The west coast Canadian city used to be a ‘hideous jungle of signs’, with one sign for every 18 residents

Text Trey Taylor

In 1953, Vancouver, Canada, was home to 19,000 glowing neon signs – more than both Los Angeles and Las Vegas. VanCity was a real-life Blade Runner, a visual assault on the senses à la Fear & Loathing. An effervescent surge started taking over Canada's west coast due to an advertising boom, and the city's locals were beginning to feel a bit lit up. Around the early 60s, newspapers started to decry: “Let’s Wake Up from Our Neon Nightmare”, writing, "We’re being led by the nose into a hideous jungle of signs. They’re outsized, outlandish, and outrageous." A bylaw was passed in 1974 to limit the erection of new signage, and classic signs so prominent in the photography of Fred Herzog – like the Smilin' Buddha Cabaret and the Niagara Hotel waterfall – were torn down. Thankfully, the Museum of Vancouver managed to salvage many castoffs from manufacturer Neon Products for its permanent exhibition Neon Vancouver, Ugly Vancouver. MOV's curator of contemporary culture, Viviane Gosselin, walks us through the throbbing glow of Vancouver's secret history of neon.

Like a scene out of Woody Allen's Manhattan, this excerpt of Neon Vancouver appeared in a BBC-TV series, Living in the British Commonwealth

1950-1962: NEON HEYDAY "The 50s and 60s were the heydays. If you look at the manufacturing, it started in the late 20s, early 30s but the peak years were the 50s/60s where there was an estimated amount of 19,000 neon signs in Vancouver. That was more than Las Vegas, Los Angeles – it was the neon city in North America. And in the world, because there’s nowhere else where you had as many neons as Vancouver. I don’t think that it ever picked up in Europe; it never had that kind of popularity. It became a lightning rod for critics in Vancouver starting in the early 60s. The natural setting is what makes Vancouver famous. The way the critics were perceiving neon is as something that was disrupting the view. We have some streets that are still very heavy on neon and it is overwhelming." 1974: SIGN CONTROL & THE TUBULAR BACKLASH "Sign control started in the 60s where you had these movements to undertake beautification of streets, but the real bylaws took place in 1974 and it prevented any new neon signs to be put up. Anything that was put up before could stay and just be maintained. The other thing that made the Vancouver neon special is the fact that the neons were leased rather than owned like everywhere else.

Courtesy of Museum of Vancouver