New Museum Shows Off Las Vegas’s Neon Side
By Timothy Pratt | The New York Times
On a night of proclamations crammed with the word “whereas,” a retired neon sign designer named Brian Leming offered a moment of levity.
It was a V.I.P. event on Tuesday before the Saturday opening of the open-air Neon Museum here after more than 15 years of effort. More than 150 neon signs made by Mr. Leming and others surrounded him, hunks of metal and glowing glass that fulfilled the growing demands of mid-20th-century commerce. They are increasingly considered expressions of history, art and architecture, worth preserving and exhibiting.
But Mr. Leming, 72, evoked their down-to-earth origins. He recalled a design meeting for the Stardust Hotel-Casino, then run by Lefty Rosenthal, a Las Vegas bookmaker and kingpin immortalized in Nicholas Pileggi’s book and Martin Scorsese’s film “Casino.” Mr. Rosenthal was notoriously detail-oriented. Read More...