The School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston didn’t have a program to study neon lights when Matt Dilling was a student, so he set up his own neon studio where he created his own designs and restored older signs.

He was able to get all the equipment he needed to get started – torch burners, vacuum pumps and supplies to work with glass – by roaming the halls at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.

Matt Dilling started Lite Brite Neon studio six years ago to restore vintage signs. PHOTO: Catherine Shu

“I pulled stuff out of the trash at MIT,” Dilling said. “MIT has very good trash.”

Dilling dropped out of art school after two years but continued to follow his interest in neon and his enterprising spirit, setting up a shop in Boston to make and restore neon signs.

Six years ago he followed the bright lights to New York, starting Lite Brite Neon in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn.

The process of renovating a neon sign isn’t much different from making a new one and involves just as much artistry. The key is to figure out what was going on in the mind of the original designer.

“Part of being able to restore old signs is how you understand the logic of how people would have originally laid out or drawn the neon,” said Dilling. 

He explained that old signs come in different states of disrepair. While some have their original tubing intact, others are damaged and Dilling and his staff have to create a new template for the neon tubing. 

Guessing what the original colors were and how to replicate them presents a challenge for sign restorers, but that’s part of the appeal.

“It’s really fun when you find a sign that’s been painted over,” said Dave Waller, a neon sign collector from Lexington, Mass. “It’s kind of fun to see the different layers.”

Restoring a neon sign can reveal a story behind the sign. Waller has a neon sign that reads “General Electric Radio.” When Waller found the sign, the words “Bill’s Radio” and “Bill’s TV” had been painted under the neon.

Someone named Bill probably wanted to use the neon sign to get customers’ attention, Waller said. But adding new lighted letters each time he began to offer a new product at his store would have been expensive. So Bill just painted what he needed to add.

When Waller restored the sign he took off Bill’s painted additions.

Waller, who has been collecting neon signs since he was a child, can do most of the restoration – the painting and electrical work – himself. But he turns to Dilling and Lite Brite to actually shape the glass and find the colors to match the original lights. He has spent as much as $2,500 to buy and restore a sign.

The main cost of a neon sign not the materials, but the labor, said David Ablon, co-owner of the New York division on TecnoLux, which is also in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn and provides supplies for neon restorers and manufacturers around the world.

There are now hundreds of colors available for neon signs, Ablon said, but before the introduction of fluorescent powders in neon signs, manufacturers could produce only five or six colors. Different gases produce different colors, so a collector who wants to be true to the original product will use those same colors.

“It’s remarkable how little has changed since 1935,” Ablon said, “other than the new colors.”

Neon produces an red-orange glow, helium glows pink and argon combined with mercury produces a blue glow.

Uranium produces a yellow-green, but it hasn’t been commonly used since the discovery of nuclear power. Ablon still has a supply of uranium tubes for restoration.

Lite Brite also draws business from all over the world and Dilling and his crewspend anywhere from two weeks to several months restoring each one.

While Las Vegas may be the unofficial capital of neon, New York City’s physical and cultural landscape has certainly been shaped by its neon signs.

The revitalization of Times Square in the 1990s, along with the introduction of new technology that allowed neon signs to perform special effects like changing color or dimming on cue has sparked a new interest in neon, said Lawrence Kogak, a Long Island lawyer who collects vintage New York City signs. “Everything about New York is big and glitzy,” Kogak said. “Neon signs are big and glitzy.  They have no subtlety at all. They grab you by the lapels and they are in your face like homeless man with a squeegee at a stoplight. That’s New York.”

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