GRANVILLE PART II
Neon Fades away

DAL RICHARDS
There was a term that became fashionable in those years, that Granville Street was called the neon jungle. It was a derogatory term used by people who were opposed to so much neon on Granville. But I was never a part of that. I thought it was very exciting. I thought that was part of Vancouver’s atmosphere.

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GRANVILLE PART II 

Neon fades away

NARRATOR
By the 1960s, media commentators began to criticize Vancouver’s neon signs. In 1966, this anti-neon column ran in the Vancouver Sun: “We’re being led by the nose into a hideous jungle of signs,” it read. “They’re desecrating our buildings, cluttering our streets, and blocking our view of some of the greatest scenery in the world.” But media commentary didn’t necessarily reflect the public mood.

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John Atkin, civic historian

JOHN ATKIN
You see, that’s the thing. There was no public outcry against neon. In fact, they quite liked the streets, because the streets were active, it attracted people. The commentators were beginning to worry about the visual quality of the city. And this is tied to the decline of American city centres with the advent of the suburbs, the freeway building programs and a determined effort to get people out of the centre of the cities and out into suburbs.

The shorthand is, decaying downtowns have neon signs left on the buildings. Decay, and a neon sign, very quickly, neon causes the decay. And if neon causes the decay, we’ve got to get rid of neon.

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Bill Pechet, architect and designer

BILL PECHET
I believe that Vancouver was subject to the same kinds of initiatives that happened in many North American cities post-war, where planning ideas of sanitization resulted in a kind of centrifugal force that took business off the streets and placed them into shopping malls. So Vancouver got seriously cleaned up at that point, but I think what happens when you clean up the city is you clean up its life.

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Once Vancouver’s 1974 neon sign bylaw came into play, hundreds of neon signs started to disappear from the street.

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Norman Young, retired theatre professor and actor

NORMAN YOUNG
I thought that was a terrible mistake. Because it was an absolute necessity in the style of way life was lived then. You take it away, and you’re taking this nerve tissue away, that nerve tissue away, or this tendon, that sinew. You’re destroying the body.

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Judy Graves, advocate for the homeless, City of Vancouver

JUDY GRAVES
The anti-neon crusade broke our hearts. It was, “Where am I?” “Am I still in downtown Vancouver?” Is this the place where, you know, we remembered Petula Clark singing “Downtown,” and the neon signs are pretty, right? Well, how do you sing that when the neon signs are gone?

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Kevin Dale McKeown, arts writer and advocate

KEVIN DALE MCKEOWN
They brought in the sign law, they decided to take all the traffic off Granville Street and turn it into a winding mall, and they built the Pacific Centre which just sucked the life out of the street scene because everybody was underground shopping.

A lot of businesses started to go out of business. The uh signature restaurants, the Scott’s Café, Reuben’s, the White Lunch, Love’s Skillet—those were thriving, exciting places. And they couldn’t hold their own once the traffic went underground. So we ended up with a strip of pizza parlours and peep shows.

BILL PECHET
It’s not just a visual thing. It has social implications. And in the case of Granville, what was the heart of the city at one point became a kind of trough of throwaway experience places. I think the more we think of ourselves of operating inside of a social and biological and cultural ecosystem, the better off we are.

JOHN ATKIN
It’s only now that we’ve fully understood the relationship between signage, ambient light, population density, transit and traffic, that Granville Street is actually beginning to get its former sort of glory and buzz back again.
 

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