NARRATOR

Civic historian John Atkin tells us about the excitement of neon in its earliest Vancouver incarnations.

JOHN ATKIN

People really wanted neon on their buildings. And so even the owner of the Vancouver Block – the big, white terracotta building with the big square clock on the top – took that clock face and they decided to put the reds and blues up on the clock face.

And so here you have, at the time, one of the tallest buildings on the city skyline and it’s now lit with these bright reds and blues. The beauty of that is red neon is actually one of the most visible light sources going, so this thing was seen just everywhere. But it’s a type of light source that attracted people to actually do that to their buildings, like “I want that on my building.”

And so there’s a real lust for this light source. And it’s something that we don’t see and have never really seen since with a lighting technology, is that real desire to have it on your building.

So many older buildings got retrofitted. But if you were trying to express how together and “with-it” you were, then you put neon into your building.