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How does the Neon Museum/Boneyard decide what to acquire and how does it raise funds for restoration?
To answer your question, we turned to the museum's Executive Director Aaron Berger. Here are his responses.
“The museum has relied on others to come to us and say, ‘We have signage or artifacts or ephemera available that we’d like to give to the museum.’ In recent years, we've found that a lot of property owners have discovered that there’s a monetary value to these items. So as a part of liquidating the property, they’re selling everything. The museum has often ended up with the remnants of what hasn’t been sold.
“We've taken, in the last year and a half to two years, a much more aggressive approach to working with the property owners -- for example, the Tropicana and the Mirage -- and reaching out at the earliest onset of learning of the site’s future, saying ‘Let us come through and make requests of what we would like to have.’
“We also let them know that we have something called the Barbara Molasky Acquisition Fund. We started this fund in 2021 and it has a small pot of money. If I have to come to the table as a buyer, I have the resources to do that. Obviously, it’s a last resort for us as a nonprofit. But we do have a restricted fund specifically for buying an object.
“Restoration is typically myself working with various individuals in town, having conversations about signage that speaks to them, and then talking to them about what it costs to restore the sign. Since I've been here, we’re restored the Plaza, Lido, and Palms signs, in that order, and we're in the process of restoring the Flamingo sign.
“Those have been individual donors. In the case of the Palms sign, it was the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians, working with them, and saying, ‘We would like to be able to tell more stories. Not just restore the sign, but also expand what this sign actually represents.' In the case of the Palms, we can now tell the story of Native tribes, because that’s a tribally owned casino. So we can expand our storytelling. With the Plaza sign, we can begin telling the story of the origin of Las Vegas, because of its location.
"In those cases, we find out what the restoration is going to cost and donors to fund it. It’s often about a year from the point where we start having conversations to the point where we’re actually about to light the sign.
“We have an internal document of the objects in our collection that are most at risk, either because they’re deteriorating at a high rate or they’re of the most historical significance. We have another Betty Willis sign, for example, who did the ‘Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas’ sign. She did the Moulin Rouge. So we have another one that is deteriorating pretty significantly, so that’s high on our list to find a donor to restore that sign and bring that back to life.
“That sign is the City Center Motel. It was designed by Betty Willis. The motel itself was on Fremont Street. It was a small motel and it has this wonderful skyline as a part of the sign itself, and that’s deteriorating very rapidly, and needs to be redone and restored. But the importance behind it is that Betty Willis designed it, so trying to make sure her pieces are kept to the forefront, that’s important.
“We also look for other signs that tell stories that we don’t really have the ability to tell. We have a couple that are pieces that expand the understanding of Las Vegas. The Frontier sign is important because it is where Siegfried & Roy really got their foothold and then, in addition to that, it’s also the scene of the Frontier strike, which was the longest strike in American history. So that’s a really critical sign, to bring that back to life because of its ability to tell so many different stories.
“If people go to NeonMuseum.org and they click on the ‘Donate’ button, they’ll be given choices for what they’d like to give. If they want to give to acquisitions, there’s the Barbara Molasky Acquisition Fund. If they want to handle sign conservation—oftentimes there are signs that are a significant issue that we have to address right away—we draw from that fund and that’s the Sign Conservation Fund. Those are the two avenues that people can direct their giving towards.”