Starlite Motel Marquee — Full Restoration

A full restoration of a roadside motel's original ruby-red-and-gold marquee — roughly 96 feet of tube across the full sign, with about a third of the original glass rebent to match sections too devitrified and cracked to save.

Close-up detail of hand-bent red neon glass tubing and electrode joints

The project

Close to two-thirds of the original 1960s tube was still structurally sound and simply needed re-gassing and rewiring to a properly sized modern transformer, but the lower third of the marquee's glass had devitrified — gone visibly cloudy and brittle with age — and had to be fully rebent from scratch, matched to the original ruby-glass-and-canary-gold color pairing by testing samples against surviving original sections before committing to the new glass.

The restored sign was re-sized to a modern outdoor-rated transformer selected against the marquee’s real full-run footage and diameter, rather than simply reusing whatever transformer capacity the sign happened to originally ship with decades ago.