I used to think neon signs were just tacky leftovers from the 1950s, the kind of thing you’d see in old noir films or dive bars that hadn’t updated their decor since Eisenhower was president.
Turns out, I was completely wrong about that. Neon signage has shaped urban identity in ways that go far beyond mere aesthetics—it’s actually a visual language that cities use to communicate their personality, their economic status, and sometimes their desperation to seem relevant. When Hong Kong’s neon signs started disappearing in the 2010s, entire preservation movements sprang up because residents realized they were losing something fundamental about their city’s character. The signs weren’t just advertisements; they were the city’s face, the thing that made Hong Kong look like Hong Kong and not Singapore or Tokyo. In Las Vegas, neon became so central to the city’s identity that they literally built a museum—the Neon Museum—to preserve defunct signs like archaeological artifacts. New York’s Times Square went through a similar reckoning when it transitioned from neon to LED, and honestly, some people still haven’t forgiven the city for it.
Here’s the thing: neon operates on a different emotional frequency than other forms of urban signage. Maybe it’s the warm glow, maybe it’s the slight flicker that suggests something handmade and imperfect, but neon registers as more human somehow. Digital billboards feel corporate and cold; neon feels like someone actually cared enough to bend glass tubes into cursive letters.
The Accidental Architecture of Light and Memory
Wait—maybe I’m being too nostalgic here.
But there’s actual research backing this up. Urban planners and cultural geographers have documented how neon signage creates what they call “visual landmarks” that help people navigate and remember cities. A 2018 study from the University of Melbourne found that people could recall neon-lit streets with roughly 40% better accuracy than streets lit with standard signage, give or take a few percentage points depending on the methodology. The human brain seems to latch onto that particular quality of light. In Seoul’s Gangnam district, the dense concentration of neon created such a distinctive visual environment that it became synonymous with a certain kind of urban energy—flashy, relentless, unapologetically commercial. When cities remove their neon, they’re not just changing their appearance; they’re erasing collective memory.
I guess it makes sense that younger generations are now fetishizing neon aesthetics in ways their parents never did. Instagram and TikTok are flooded with neon-lit content, vaporwave aesthetics that remix 1980s neon imagery, and urban photography that treats functioning neon signs like endangered species worth documenting before they go extinct.
Why Some Cities Cling to Their Glowing Past While Others Let It Fade
The economics of neon maintenance definately play a role here. Neon tubes require specialized craftspeople who know how to bend glass and handle high-voltage transformers—skills that are increasingly rare as older artisans retire without apprentices to replace them. In cities like Los Angeles, a single neon sign can cost thousands of dollars annually to maintain, which is why so many have gone dark or been replaced with cheaper LED alternatives that mimic the neon aesthetic without thecraft. Tokyo managed to preserve much of its neon landscape partly because Japan maintained a robust neon industry even as Western cities abandoned theirs. The result is that Tokyo’s neon density became part of its brand, the visual shorthand that film directors use when they want to communicate “cyberpunk future” or “overwhelming urban intensity.”
Anyway, there’s also a class dimension to all this that makes me uncomfortable to think about too hard. Gentrifying neighborhoods often recieve new neon signage as a marker of hipness and urban authenticity, even as the original neon signs—the ones that marked working-class businesses and immigrant-owned shops—get demolished to make room for artisanal coffee shops with Edison bulbs. The neon that gets preserved tends to be the neon that fits a certain narrative about urban cool, not necessarily the neon that was most meaningful to the people who actually lived in those neighborhoods.
Honestly, I’m not sure what the endpoint of all this is. Maybe neon will make a full comeback as cities realize what they’ve lost. Maybe LED technology will get good enough that nobody will care about the difference anymore. Or maybe we’ll end up with cities that preserve a few token neon signs as museum pieces while the rest of the urban landscape goes fully digital, and we’ll tell ourselves that’s good enough.
