As the news began to circulate last fall that the longtime Mission District dive bar Doc’s Clock would close and relocate, most locals had the same first question:

What about the sign?

The Doc’s Clock sign is an unforgettable marquee, a Mission Street landmark. Fire-hydrant red, it flashes “DOC’S CLOCK COCKTAIL TIME” in fluorescent lights, the lettering framed by neon-blue, cherry-garnished coupes. It’s trimmed by a twinkling gold arc, whose bases form arrows, directing you toward the door.

The sign is an anachronism — not only aesthetically but legally. The city of San Francisco doesn’t allow signs like this anymore. Though the rules vary by neighborhood, in general, new signs must be shallower, shorter and a lot less illuminated than the 56-year-old Doc’s Clock sign, which, like many other flashing neon facades around the city, was grandfathered into the regulations.

On Saturday, after almost a year of nostalgic outpourings, Doc’s Clock served its last drink in the bar’s original 2575 Mission St. location, near 22nd Street. It is expected to reopen on the next block, at 2417 Mission St., by July 1. After a long, bitter dispute over the sign between landlord and tenant, the fate of the sign finally became clear: It would not be coming with Doc’s.

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“It’s still sad,” said bar owner Carey Suckow. “We didn’t want to go, and we didn’t want to give up the sign. But we’re staying positive.”

Ironically, however, the sign likely won’t be able to stay at its current location either. It falls into a regulatory limbo: It’s the property of the building owner, yet the building owner can’t keep it up if the corresponding business moves elsewhere.

The plight of the Doc’s sign introduces a new and absurd dimension to the now-familiar narrative of small businesses displaced by a changing city. Whereas the real estate value of the Doc’s building is obvious, the sign’s value comes from attributes that money can’t buy: its regulatory loophole, its status as a beloved Mission Street beacon. If Doc’s can’t keep the sign, and the building can’t keep the sign, does anybody win?

Like many bar proprietors, Suckow, who has owned Doc’s Clock since 2005, does not own the bar’s building. Two years ago, she got a new landlord: Leticia Luna, owner of SoMa’s Calle 11 and a number of restaurant properties in the city. The previous landlord, who had owned the building for decades, had died; Luna bought it through an estate.

The building at 2575 Mission St. was built in 1907, and in its early years housed an ice cream parlor, a candy shop, then a bakery. It began serving drinks in 1951: the Clock Bar. Ten years later, dentist Ralph Mancuso bought the business, renamed it Doc’s Clock — a reference to himself — and installed the now-famous marquee. Local lore has it that the doc saw patients in the units above the bar, though Suckow believes his practice could have been across the street.

Mancuso sold the business in 1968. A succession of owners followed; not all kept careful records. The artist behind the mural inside the bar, painted in the ’70s or ’80s, remains a mystery. Documentation picks up again in 1997, when Elizabeth Zoria and Susan Hertzfeldt, two bartenders at the Latin American Club, bought the business.

Zoria and Hertzfeldt sold the bar to Suckow in 2005, despite higher offers from other interested buyers. Suckow had recently abandoned a teaching career for bartending, and longed to create “an old-man bar,” in her words. “Not a bar with a theme. The kind of place where you see the whole community: the old guy sitting next to the 21-year-old, sitting next to the middle-aged couple, and it’s not weird.”

Under Suckow’s stewardship, Doc’s Clock has remained blissfully impervious to the cocktail trends surrounding it. It has preserved a grunge that feels reassuring. It draws patrons not for rare amaro but for shuffleboard tournaments, not for $15 craft concoctions but for drink specials like the Trailer Park Punch (vodka, Malibu rum, Sunny D, cranberry juice; $5). Raggedy dolls, the sort that might have given you a nightmare once, hang from the ceiling: the result of Doc’s annual Barbie mutilation charity event on Halloween.

Unfortunately for Suckow, her lease was slated to end in the summer of 2017, and there wasn’t an option to extend. (Residential units upstairs from the bar, Luna said, have ongoing leases, and tenants have not been evicted.) As the new landlord, Luna said she tried to work with Suckow to figure out a solution — including offering to move Doc’s Clock into the smaller adjacent space, which Luna also bought, currently housing Lipstick Salon Beauty Supply. But by both women’s accounts, the negotiations turned ugly.

“Everyone’s worried,” Suckow said at the time, as support for Doc’s flooded Twitter and Facebook. “The city’s lost too much, and people are worried they’re going to lose even more.” Luna, meanwhile, countered that Suckow’s “mind is not open to the reality of what’s going on” — the true cost of doing business today in the Mission.

When Suckow threw in the towel and told Luna she’d found a new space to move into, Luna said she told her, “Carey, you made my life easier.”

Suckow subsequently applied for legacy business status for Doc’s Clock — an initiative meant to incentivize landlords to keep long-term tenants. With the move already in the works, the approval may have seemed like too little, too late. Still, the legacy business process helped Doc’s Clock get its new lease, Suckow said, and at a better price.

She secured a 10-year lease with a 10-year option to extend. At that point, Suckow said, “my daughters will have it.”

Doc’s, then, is getting a second life. So how much does a sign really matter, anyway?

“Our culture is at stake,” said Nick Bovis, owner of Gold Dust Lounge and Lefty O’Doul’s, two bars forced out of their longtime Union Square building by a landlord. (Gold Dust relocated to Fisherman’s Wharf in 2013; Lefty’s is still looking for a new home.)

“It’s a bigger picture than what we think,” he said. “One by one, you knock out these culturally significant things. Before you blink your eye, it’s all gone.”

The original Gold Dust Lounge is now an Express clothing store. But with or without its sign, it would be a stretch to imagine that Doc’s Clock will go that way under the ownership of Luna, who leases buildings to many locally owned, independent bars, like Hi Tops, Rumors, Roccapulco and Brewcade.

Luna, for her part, grew up mere blocks from Doc’s, at 20th and Mission.“I’m a native,” Luna said. “I remember that sign. She (Suckow) has been there a decade. The sign means more to me.”

In the Planning Department’s eyes, the sign means more to the city. It was approved as a “vintage sign,” which means that it could have been moved to the business’ new location, despite not complying with today’s signage standards.

But that would have required the permission of the landlord, who technically owns the sign as part of the property. And Luna wouldn’t release it to Suckow.

Luna has some regulatory hangups ahead, however. Gina Simi, communications manager for the Planning Department, confirmed that if Luna keeps it up, the sign “would be considered general advertising,” because it will bear the name of a business located elsewhere — and therefore, it would be subject to current zoning requirements.

Nor could Luna alter the sign to reflect the name of a potential new business. “As it exists now, it was grandfathered in,” Simi said. “Any alterations to the sign would remove its status as a vintage sign, and it would have to be removed as it is currently not code compliant.”

So why not let Suckow take the sign to the new bar?

“That sign is worth quite a bit of money,” Luna said. She may be right, though it’s hard to measure the market for antique bar facades.

“At this point, go for it,” Suckow said. “I’m tired.”

As Suckow and her team relocate over the next month, they hope to bring as much of the physical bar with them as they can — with the goal of keeping everything the same. “We’ll be a little cleaner at first,” Suckow said, “but we’ll do our best to rough it up a bit.”

Most important, they’re keeping their entire staff. Lisa Francis, a bartender at Doc’s for 8½ years, said that despite the upheaval, she never considered leaving her job. “This is the best place I ever worked in my life,” Francis said. “We’re family here.”

When considering a sign at the new Doc’s, Suckow doesn’t want to merely create a smaller, code-compliant version of the old flashy marquee. “We’ll probably do something different,” she said, though she doesn’t yet know what.

Luna has not yet secured new tenants for the bar and hair-salon spaces. At one point, she spoke about combining them into a single unit, but she’s rethinking that.

“I might just keep it the way it is,” Luna said.

Esther Mobley is The San Francisco Chronicle’s wine, beer and spirits writer. Email: emobley@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Esther_mobley Instagram: @esthermob