The Neon Museum Boneyard: Signs Without Buildings

The Stardust sign is here. So is the Caesars Palace horse-and-chariot. The Moulin Rouge marquee. The Desert Inn script lettering. More than two hundred signs from Las Vegas casinos, hotels, and businesses that no longer exist, standing in a lot north of downtown without the buildings that once gave them context.

The Neon Museum's outdoor collection, known as the Boneyard, began accumulating in the nineteen nineties as preservationists recognized that the neon signs being torn down as casinos were demolished were the most distinctive visual artifacts of twentieth-century Las Vegas, and that once they were gone they would not come back. Neon is handmade, individually crafted, and irreplaceable in the way that mass-produced objects are not.

What makes the collection unusual is not what it preserves but what it implies. Each sign is the ghost of a building. The Stardust imploded in two thousand seven; its sign still glows at night under the museum's preservation lighting. The Desert Inn, where Howard Hughes lived for four years without leaving the penthouse, is Wynn Las Vegas now; its sign is here. The Moulin Rouge, where the nineteen sixty desegregation agreement was signed, burned in two thousand three; its sign survived.

The Boneyard is the only place in Las Vegas where you can read the city's architectural history without the buildings getting in the way. Every sign is a marker of something that stood here, or somewhere else in the city, and is now gone. What Las Vegas tears down it rarely replaces with anything that means as much. The Neon Museum is the archive of what the city meant to build.