Few institutions in Las Vegas are as unexpectedly moving as the Neon Museum, where you are now. The outdoor collection — known as the Neon Boneyard — contains more than 200 rescued signs from Las Vegas's history, dating from the 1930s to the present day. They lie and lean in various states of preservation: the original Caesars Palace sign, the Stardust's spectacular starfield design, the Silver Slipper's spinning pump, the Moulin Rouge's dancer, and dozens of smaller signs from motels, restaurants, and shops that have long since been demolished.
Neon signs are the indigenous art form of twentieth-century Las Vegas. The craft of bending glass tubes and filling them with noble gases that glow when electricity passes through them was developed in the 1910s, arrived in Las Vegas in the 1930s, and reached its apex in the 1950s and 60s when the designers of the Young Electric Sign Company created masterpieces of animated spectacle that have never been equaled. These signs were not merely advertisements; they were the architecture of desire, telling anyone on Highway 91 what waited for them inside.
The La Concha Motel lobby serves as the museum's visitor center — its sweeping concrete shell by architect Paul Revere Williams was relocated here piece by piece after the motel was demolished in 2005. Williams was one of the most important Black architects of the twentieth century, and his presence in Las Vegas is another layer of the city's complicated, underexamined history.