Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign Audio Guide

Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas Sign: what does the audio guide cover?

1. 01

   Welcome to the Las Vegas Sign

   You are standing at one of the most photographed pieces of roadside art in the world: the Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign. It rises about 25 feet tall in the median of Las Vegas Boulevard South, at the southern end of the Strip. Its address is 5100 Las Vegas Boulevard South. It stands north of the historic stone pillars of the old McCarran Field on the east side. On the west side, you are level with the Bali Hai Golf Club. Here is a twist to carry in your pocket. Despite the name, this sign sits outside the city limits of Las Vegas, in the town of Paradise. Most of the famous Strip lies in the same unincorporated territory, so the welcome greets you on behalf of a whole resort corridor, not a municipal boundary. Over the next few minutes we will look at who dreamed it up, what its design is made of, how it nearly slipped into obscurity, and how it became a landmark that a significant portion of the city's visitors stop to photograph.

2. 02

   Betty Willis and a Salesman's Idea

   Every other neon sign on the Strip in the late 1950s was advertising something: a hotel, a casino, a restaurant. A local salesman named Ted Rogich admired those glowing signs and felt that the city itself deserved one. So he asked a pioneering Las Vegas commercial artist, Betty Willis, to design it, and he then sold the idea to the government of Clark County. The project was funded in May 1959. Clark County approved the winning bid from Western Neon, which built and erected the sign soon after. Willis created a compact roadside language: bulbs, neon, script lettering, circles and an eight-point star. Here is the generous part of her story. Willis never copyrighted the design, hoping it would be used freely. Today the sign's likeness appears on clothing, food and all manner of souvenirs. It was even chosen as the official logo of Las Vegas' centennial celebration. Willis kept designing signs until she retired at the age of 77, yet this one remains her most famous.

3. 03

   Reading the Sign: Silver Dollars and Cursive

   Take a moment to read it from the south side, the way arriving drivers once did. Across the top runs a row of white circles meant to evoke silver dollars, and each letter of the word Welcome sits inside one. Beneath them, the words to Fabulous appear in blue, in a 1950s-style cursive. Then comes Las Vegas in red capital letters, large enough to nearly fill the width of the sign. A smaller line below names Nevada. The cabinet is faced with translucent white plastic and covered with blue and red painted text. That is why the sign has such a retro, almost candy-like look, a piece of mid-century optimism in a median. The sign also has a farewell for those leaving town, so if you can safely and legally view the other side, notice how the message changes from greeting to goodbye. It is a small reminder that roadside signs were designed to speak to drivers moving at speed.

4. 04

   From Dark Median to Famous Photo Stop

   By the 1970s, neon was falling out of fashion on the Strip. High-rise towers were multiplying, and established resorts were replacing their neon with more modern signage. The welcome sign, meanwhile, went unattended for years. At one point it stood in darkness with its power shut off, looking like a relic from another era. Its fortunes turned partly thanks to the traffic of curious visitors. A nearby motel owner, John Woodrum, noticed tourists frequently stopping to take photos of it. Decades before the grassy area, driveway entrance and parking spaces existed, people would race across Las Vegas Boulevard to pose beside it. The sign even had its big screen debut in the summer of 1965, when the low-budget filmmaker Ray Dennis Steckler filmed a car passing it, ending in a close-up, for a thriller called The Velvet Trap. Endurance did the rest. Everything around it was gradually blown up or replaced, until it became the last piece of the fabulous fifties left standing. Much of the original was rebuilt with sturdier materials at the factory of YESCO, which took ownership of the sign when it purchased Western Neon and has maintained it ever since under a contract with the county.

5. 05

   Before You Head Off

   The sign's status is now official. In late 2008, Clark County employees sought to have it listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the Nevada State Historic Preservation Office nominated it, and the National Park Service approved the designation on May first, 2009. On December sixth, 2013, it was added to the State Register of Historic Places as well. Its fame has also spawned siblings. A Welcome to Fabulous Downtown Las Vegas sign was erected in 2002 at Las Vegas Boulevard and 4th Street, and a replica went up on Boulder Highway in March 2007. A downtown version also appears on a tower of the SlotZilla Zipline at the Fremont Street Experience. If you want the deeper backstory of Las Vegas neon, look into the Neon Museum, founded in 1996, which keeps discarded signs on a lot of about 2 acres called the Boneyard. Before you go, glance up at the sign one more time and ask yourself what made this humble roadside greeting outlast almost everything built around it.