If New Orleans has a siren song, it’s neon. Hotel Monteleone’s distinctive rooftop sign blazes red against the horizon. The lush greenery of the tropical isle inspires revelers to enjoy their Hand Grenade cocktail. Uptown diner Camelia Grill’s columns are emblazoned with retro pink script, and the Joy Theatre’s marquee electrifies Canal Street with nostalgic romance. But the art behind that neon is endangered.
That’s where Nate Schaefer comes in. Since opening her shop Big Sexy Neon in 2020, she’s worked to save the city’s historic signs and its glowing aesthetic, tinkering with centuries-old glass or crafting brand-new tubing as well as designing her own eye-catching pieces. The workplace, recently relocated to nearby Metairie and filled from floor to ceiling with his fascinating original creations, demands a visit. There you can find him using canisters of argon and krypton, beads of mercury, welding torches, and enough voltage to kill a moose.
The artist shapes glass tubing for the work in progress.
“I should be dead,” Schaefer says, his broad six-foot-five-inch frame bent over tiny jumper cables that he connects to high-voltage transformers that burn out the neon with a jolt. “Once I got hit by lightning so badly that the blast dislocated my shoulder.” Their commissions come with other dangers: Dealing with historic sites in New Orleans can also lead to explosive reactions.
Take Tujague. The city’s second-oldest restaurant had to relocate a few blocks away on Decatur Street in 2020, and last year, the owners removed its historic, giant neon sign. A fierce conservationist army united online. Reddit threads were glowing red. Ultimately, the pressure prevailed, and the Tujag sign secured a secure, permanent future; Private donors sent it to Schaefer for renovation, and it now burns inside the Southern Food and Drink Museum.
So then, Schaefer makes sense, quickly becoming an urban fixture. Born and raised in Pennsylvania, the youngest of eight children, the artist describes his childhood as economically poor but educationally prosperous. “My father was a machinist for a railway equipment company,” he says. “I watched my parents build and repair Everything” At UNC-Chapel Hill, he switched his studies from physics to art, and professor and artist Jerry Noe introduced Schaefer to the craft of American neon. However, after running neon shops in North Carolina for several decades, “there was a woman who took me to New Orleans,” he admits with a laugh. “It doesn’t hurt that this city has an incredible neon history.”
This history began with the discovery of neon in 1898. Sign manufacturers were filling tubes with noble gases more than a decade later. And “it’s still done that way,” says Schaefer. Even better, “It’s completely sustainable. I can reuse everything I need from old signs.” And although you could use any noble gas, including argon, krypton, xenon, and helium, to illuminate the tubing, neon was the name that stuck. “By the 1950s, there was more neon in New Orleans than in Las Vegas. Canal Street had six hundred signs within a few blocks.”
Schaefer is a storyteller, and her appreciation of history is reflected in her personal works as well. For many of those works, he decorated ephemera – reclaimed wood, children’s toys, old advertisements – with neon accents. They have exhibited nationally, and although there has been a resurgence of the art, the future remains bleak for signage.
A phrenology major by Schaefer.
“Neon takes a decade to learn, and a decade to become proficient,” he explains, “so it’s not a career that people can study intensively anymore. Only a few offer apprenticeships. Also, China took over beer sign production in the late nineties. Now everything is LED. It’s cheaper and faster to produce, but just becomes trash when it breaks. Maintained neon signs last a hundred years or Will last longer than that.”
Standing over his butcher-paper sketch spread out on the floor in Big Sexy Neon, Schaefer demonstrates how he heats, blows, and bends glass. The aging process called paint requires a drop of liquid mercury to bring out the color, and then he ends up with those little jumper cables that almost killed him.
In addition to his own pieces, Schaefer accepts commissions, and I can’t resist. I drop an old toy ray gun from the 1930s. Two weeks later, he installed it above my powder room sink. He has set the toy on a dark base with it tilted upwards. We flip the switch. The gun blinks in a neon red lightning bolt, with blue, concentric blast circles. I call out a hearty “pew pew!” And we clap like children.
jenny adams is a full-time freelance writer and photographer, often writing articles on great food, stiff drinks, and interesting characters she meets along the way. She lives in New Orleans with a black cat, a spotted puppy, and a Kiwi-born husband. Right now, she’s working on a (never-ending) horror novel set in the French Quarter.
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