Friday, March 7, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.
A museum with just one piece of art -- even a glittery one like the horse and rider at the mouth of the Fremont Street Experience -- can get boring after a while.
The City Council, at its public meeting Monday, is expected to do something about that when it decides whether to allocate $10,000 to obtain three more signs for its outdoor Neon Museum from the Young Electric Sign Co. graveyard.
The horse and rider that once greeted guests at the old Hacienda Hotel, which was imploded on New Year's Eve, was erected last year as the museum's first piece of neon nostalgia -- an art form truly synonymous with glitzy and sometimes gaudy Las Vegas.
The proposed pieces for the museum, some badly rusted from years of exposure to the elements after they outlived their use at various hotels and other businesses, will be restored through private donations after the city obtains them, city officials said. They will be located alongside the city's big red parking garage.
The $10,000 allocation will come from funds already budgeted for the Neon Museum, Sharon Segerblom, manager of the city's neighborhood services department, said in a memo to the council.
The next three pieces that will be erected in the coming months include one neon attraction from a Strip hotel and two others from liquor establishments.
They are the Aladdin's Lamp from the Aladdin hotel-casino on the south end of the Strip, the old Fifth Street Liquor sign and the old Flame restaurant sign.
The Fifth Street Liquor sign is believed to have been the first moving neon sign in Las Vegas. It would light up at night in various phases to show a bottle of liquor pouring its contents into a martini glass. The old name for Las Vegas Boulevard was Fifth Street.
The Flame sign was relatively new to the YESCO boneyard, as it was taken down in recent years when the Strip restaurant and bar was leveled to make room for the underground portion of the Desert Inn Super Arterial.
The Flame was long a popular hangout for local boxing writers who would frequent the watering hole after covering the weekly fights at the Silver Slipper from the 1960s to the 1980s.
When the national boxing writers came to town for the world championship fights, they were introduced to the eatery by the local writers and eventually adopted it as their hangout as well.
The City Council approved establishment of the long-planned museum last Sept. 18 as a means of promoting the historical and artistic significance of neon signs.
It had long been planned for an indoor site on the so-called "cultural corridor" on Las Vegas Boulevard North, where the city library and Museum of Natural History are located.
But with the construction of the Fremont Street Experience light show and canopy, city officials figured a more appropriate location for such a museum would be adjacent to the major tourist attraction.
The city entered a seven-year deal with YESCO to obtain the signs. The city also gained exclusive rights to use the former YESCO-owned signs in literature, marketing and merchandising materials.
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