A Switch in Store for Neon?

Roman Yanez has been designing signs in Laguna Beach for more than 30 years. Being an artist isn’t enough these days, however. He has to be a diplomat and politician as well.

“It’s very restrictive,” said Yanez, proprietor of the Roman Sign Studio on Laguna Canyon Road. His designs, like everyone else’s, have to be approved by the city’s powerful Design Review Board, which has jurisdiction over signage, architecture, construction, landscaping and virtually every other visual aspect of city planning.

“There are five people who decide whether or not you can have your project,” Yanez said of the board, and maintaining good relations with them is a critical component of success.

Laguna Beach, which already restricts the size, style, color and location of commercial signs as well as prohibits neon outdoors, is now considering outlawing neon entirely as inconsistent with the city’s image as a picturesque seaside community. That attitude is not atypical in California, said Ham Shirvani, a professor of architecture at Chapman University and author of four books on urban planning.

Until the 1950s, Shirvani said, few American cities had laws restricting signs. The result was a visual feast of colors, shapes and advertising messages set against the backdrop of a burgeoning postwar economy and increasingly auto-oriented culture.

Initially, city planners dealt with the situation through ordinances restricting the numbers and locations of urban signs, Shirvani said, and, for a time, that sufficed. By the early 1970s, local laws were beginning to deal with size and height as well. More recently, Shirvani said, the issue of aesthetics has come into play.

“Urban design was emerging as a strong tool for community development,” Shirvani said, “and that extended itself to letters, characters, colors, compatibility with architecture and design. Southern California is a pioneer in this--in large scale, Los Angeles and Orange counties are on the cutting edge.”

So it is that Seal Beach bans “signs which incorporate any manner of flashing, moving, or intermittent lighting” as well as “flags, banners, pennants” and portable or sandwich-board signs. Costa Mesa adds to that list inflatable signs and advertising balloons larger than 24 inches in diameter. Huntington Beach is even more strict, outlawing “signs which produce odor, sound, smoke, fire or other such emissions” in addition to signs affixed to automobiles, trucks, trailers or other vehicles and “animals or human beings, live or simulated, utilized as signs.”

When Anaheim underwent an extensive face lift two years ago in conjunction with Disneyland’s plans to open a new theme park, it replaced the flashing neon and oversize caricatures that once gave a whimsical look to the city’s downtown commercial district. The screaming signs of the past have yielded to low-to-the-ground placards that whisper to passing motorists.

“This was a developer’s version of a Wild West town,” city spokesman Bret Colson said at the time. “We’ve tried to clean up a lot of the visual clutter.”

Officials in Laguna Beach say they are weighing the same issue as they consider the ban on neon, which already must be set back at least 3 feet from windows.

“We’re dealing with visual blight. Three feet just doesn’t accomplish the original intention of the ordinance,” said Toni Iseman, a City Council member who last month asked the Planning Commission to consider prohibiting any neon sign that can be seen from the street.

Ben Simon, a Design Review Board member, supports that proposal. “It’s not really necessary or appropriate in a town like Laguna,” he said of neon signage. “I think it’s unnecessarily bright and visually imposing. Neon can stay in Las Vegas where it belongs.”

Chapman professor Shirvani thinks some cities--and he points to Laguna Beach as an example--may go too far.

“When you have too much control, so much dictating of every sign, I’m not sure that’s healthy,” he said. “There has to be a margin, a border that provides balance. You need certain rules and guidelines for consistency and compatibility, but you have to leave the rest for creativity and innovation.”

Local merchants complain that such restrictions limit their freedom to do business.

“We pay a premium in rent, and we can’t really make ourselves visible,” said Sam Omar, owner of Laguna Beach’s Koffee Klatch, a Coast Highway coffeehouse with an interior neon sign. Without it, he said, “It would be hard to draw customers.”

Nick Cocores, manager of Toes on the Nose surf shop on South Coast Highway chafes over restrictions and would not welcome a ban. “Neon is an eye-catcher,” he said. “It would be nice to be able to put it anywhere we want.”

Said sign maker Yanez: “They want too many controls. . . . This is an eclectic town. We are all eccentrics here, and we need an eclectic environment.”

Even he concedes, though, that planners have a monumental task. “The trick,” he said, “is to find the middle ground. Environmentalists shouldn’t become enviro-Nazis.”