Safeguarding the Lights Fantastic

This new weekly column chronicles life in Southern California--the small moments that define this community. The funny, the bizarre, the poignant, the mundane. The people, some of them celebrated, some not. Reader suggestions are welcome.

John English fell for Los Angeles the first time he spied the neon sign taking off from the roof of Ship’s coffee shop in Westwood: “Orange neon--with rocket tails--in the night. Wow!”

The building was demolished in 1984, but at the 11th hour a Holmby Hills woman had the sign carted off to her back yard. Gone, though, are many of the other neon extravaganzas around Southern California that once beckoned motorists in their fin-tailed Detroit-made beauties to stop, eat, buy, play.

But English, an expatriate Northern Californian who wasn’t even born in the 1950s (he’s 29), isn’t going to let the survivors disappear without a fight.

He is a free-lance multimedia designer, ardent preservationist, and self-described and self-taught “commercial archeologist.” And, wherever there is an audience, he will wax poetic on the merits of “Googie architecture” (named in loving memory of Googies, a classic ‘50s L.A. coffee shop).

English also conducts “Googie Tours,” whisking sightseers past those miles and miles of new mini-malls--which he dismisses as of the “just-add-water Mission revival” school of design. Those back-lit plastic signs? “A fast-food menu for the passing motorist.”

He’ll take neon and lots of it. To him, those buildings are living treasures to be enjoyed while they’re still around. And their signs are not mere markers but integral to the design. Big. And outrageous.

With friends, English tried to save the sign from the old Bob’s Big Boy in West Covina, but, alas, they had to watch as it crumbled, rusted through, as the crane’s teeth bit into it.

These signs are original art, he argues--not retro-’50s--and they’re important to the history of L.A. and “our auto-mobility.” He laments that, because this was commercial roadside art, it wasn’t taken seriously.

“One day you come to a corner and the sign is gone,” he frets. As a member of the Post-World War II and Modern Committee of the L.A. Conservancy, he is something of a watchdog for endangered neon signs.

English is convinced that people love neon--because “it’s brash, it’s wild.” And at night, there isn’t a better show in town.