Every neon sign made to beckon you in from the sidewalk for a slice of pizza, to lure you off the highway exit for a pit stop or to tell you “We’re Open” is made from the same blueprint of six or so basic bends. For an artist, there’s no limit to what those basic bends can become.
Neon signs blend art, advertising and architecture into fragile, hot and buzzing landmarks. In Richmond, neon is a glowing backdrop for our city, lighting up landmarks such as The Triple pool hall, illuminating the Westland Shopping Center with a saguaro cactus and showing off some impressive branding in tattoo parlor windows. Though the works themselves may be easy to spot, the city’s neon sign makers are a rare breed, with only one shop dedicated to the commercial art form.
Walk into Uptown Neon on Cary Street in the Fan during the store’s public hours (noon to 4 p.m. Tuesday-Friday), and you’ll see a bright future. Duck under the mess of clear and colored tubes suspended in the air and toward the open blue flames of the glass-bending torches while squinting and sweating, to enter the domain of a master of a dated, but not faded, art.
From an aging yellow couch near the studio’s front window, Chloe Kottwitz reflects on her first anniversary of owning the shop. After the founder, Douglas Solyan, died in February 2022, Kottwitz filled orders until officially purchasing the shop in April 2023. Half of her face is aglow, thanks to some 60 watts of electricity turning a blend of gases (in this case, argon and mercury) into plasma, which reacts with a phosphor coating inside the glass tubing to produce a powerful green hue. Shifting back slightly, she’s suddenly under the glow of the ruby-red combustion of neon gas in the shape of a music note.
“That’s really what neon is,” Kottwitz says. “It’s a gas trapped in the glass. When it’s excited by electricity, the photons are visible, and we’re able to see that wavelength.” Not all neon signs contain neon gas; other noble and non-noble gases are popular for the variety of colors they enable.
Kottwitz moved to Richmond to apprentice under Solyan in August 2021, after a colleague of Solyan’s in the world of neon engineers connected the two. While in art school at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University near her hometown in western New York, she was introduced to neon bending as a creative medium. She specialized in neon production, hoping to bring her designs to life in a gallery setting after graduation.
“The plan was to come [to Richmond] for one year,” Kottwitz says. “My professor suggested, ’You can learn enough from the commercial world in a year. Go build up your skills, and then go back to being an artist, if that’s what you want to do.’”
Solyan “pretty much threw me in the fires,” Kottwitz says, showing her how to use some trade machines unique to commercial sign shops that were unavailable to her in art school.
“I was learning as I went, but overall that first week, we just kind of hit it off. He said, ‘OK, I think we could make this work,’” she says. “‘If you can find a place to live, why don’t you come back, and I’ll teach you what I can.’”
A Glowing, Humming History
Kottwitz has become part of a larger story of the creative history of neon signage in Richmond. A trade valued for its quirkiness and craftsmanship, it keeps small businesses attractive and fosters a connection between the arts and commerce.
Artists and advertisers in equal parts introduced neon to the River City, much like the array of handpainted signs on the city’s brick facades. When neon reached peak popularity in the mid-20th century, large light structures appeared atop buildings and in storefronts to attract foot and car traffic.
Talley Neon, now the Talley Sign Co., produced most of Richmond’s neon signs in the 1950s and ’60s, and Louis Rudd was its most prolific artist. He went from handpainting signs to designing neon for the company and was largely self-taught, but he produced signs big and small. Rudd was responsible for iconic Richmond signs for Thalhimers and Miller & Rhoads department stores and The Triple pool hall (now occupied by Don’t Look Back restaurant), among countless others.
“Talley made most every neon sign you would have seen in Richmond for a time,” says Christina Vida, curator of general collections at The Valentine museum, which has been collecting and preserving the city’s signs since businesses began to shed them in favor of cheaper and more varied ways to advertise in the latter half of the 20th century.
Last year, Vida curated “Sign Spotting,” an exhibit based on the museum’s collection of historical signs, including many neon works.
“With the redevelopment of roads, signs became crucial to attract incredible amounts of people to businesses in Richmond, and neon signs could do that 24/7,” Vida notes. Included in the exhibit was a selection of the neon labels from the old Trailways bus station at Ninth and Broad streets. An act of civil disobedience there in 1958 led to a landmark decision in the Civil Rights Movement.
Bruce Boynton, a Black law student at Howard University in Washington, D.C., stopped at the Richmond Trailways station on a layover during a bus ride to Selma, Alabama. At the station, Boynton was arrested for ordering food in a “whites only” section of a segregated restaurant. He appealed his crime all the way to the Supreme Court, where the justices ruled in his favor, citing a violation of the Interstate Commerce Clause.
“And so, these transportation-related sites can no longer be segregated based on this moment,” Vida explains. “History happened here, underneath this sign in 1958.”
Despite their ubiquity in midcentury cities, neon signs had declined in popularity by the time Douglas Solyan took an interest in them. His first career was resilvering mirrors, but in the early ’80s, he began collecting neon as a hobby. Soon after he picked up his first piece, he began to study the bends and folds in the glass long enough to learn the basics, forging a desire to learn more.
Soon, Rudd began mentoring Solyan, a relationship that turned into friendship based on their mutual passion for sign making. In 1987, Solyan launched Uptown Neon. He continued to learn, and the shop slowly filled with bits and pieces and finished works of neon that dangled from the rafters and walls, giving the space a perpetual hum.
“This specific shop is really unique for its collection,” Kottwitz says. “Most shops aren’t going to have this amount of premade neon around.”
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Neon sign making involves glass blowing, as Kottwitz displays.
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An original piece created by Kottwitz for interior design firm Abode in Richmond
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Douglas Solyan’s take on the traditional neon “Open” sign, hanging at Mom’s Siam restaurant
Flickering Fortunes
As the ’90s rolled into a new millennium, a number of factors, including affordability and changing fads, led neon producers to pivot to less-expensive electric signs, leaving Solyan as the last artist dedicated to making neon in Richmond.
But Uptown Neon stayed the course, and Solyan’s works continued to appear across town. He kept Richmond well lit as he repaired signs around the city and saved the ones he could in his shop.
Six months into Kottwitz’s apprenticeship, Douglas Solyan died at the age of 79, after 35 years of operating the business.
“I didn’t know that it would be so quick,” Kottwitz says. “Going from not really knowing how to do it, to feeling pretty confident, to losing your mentor, that was a lot. He and his wife were really the only people that I knew in town, and he became family.”
Despite their short time together, Solyan had imparted his passion for the craft to Kottwitz. “He had given me enough of the spark of like, ‘You can do this, if you can just get yourself to bend. You’re going to get better, and you’re going to be able to keep enjoying it,’” she says.
Solyan and Uptown Neon played as much of a role in designing Richmond’s aesthetic and appearance as the architects and city planners of years past. Solyan produced his own take on one of the most ubiquitous neon signs ever made, something Richmonders might not realize they can see everywhere.
“There’s a specifically Richmond neon ‘open’ sign around town, and that’s specifically Doug’s,” Kottwitz says. “Stanley’s has it, Mom’s Siam has it, The Franklin Inn has it, Poe’s Pub has a great one.”
Despite making perhaps the most traditional, recognizable piece of neon in the form’s 130-year history, Solyan’s spin keeps Richmond small businesses distinct from other cities.
Tattoo parlors, including Yellow Bird Tattoo on Main Street in the Fan, are practically synonymous with attractive neon installations. When Joe Fessman established the shop in 2016, he went to Uptown Neon to have the corner building’s windows bordered with yellow lines and lettering, and he had Solyan create the shop’s namesake design.
“Neon was my secret weapon,” Fessman says. “I wanted to bring a lot of attention to our business, but I knew the attention coming to this business would also bring attention to the other businesses next door.”
For Fessman, the similarities between his business and creatives like Kottwitz show the bond between tattoo shops and the neon that adorns them. “It’s the same thing with tattooing: People are trying to make art, but there’s still the utility value to it,” he says.
Walk around Richmond’s neighborhoods or drive down its main thoroughfares, and you’ll see buzzing bits of history left and right, most made or repaired by Chloe Kottwitz, Douglas Solyan and Louis Rudd.
Where does neon fit in today? If spotted in popular media, neon represents the past’s vision of the future. But for many invested in Richmond’s business community, neon isn’t a throwback; it’s part of a more authentic Richmond.
“The art scene that had always been there sees a blossoming in the 2010s,” Vida says. “Post-recession, it started to be craft everything — craft beer, vintage clothing, you can see general blossoming at the time as things start to recover, and signs like these ride that wave.”
“The fact that it is a craft and handmade ... people certainly are intrigued and want it," Kottwitz says. “We’re experiencing a bit of like an upswing, though it definitely didn’t go away before.”
This month, she made a return to her art-school dreams with a First Fridays pop-up showcasing original neon works at Odd Bird, a creative home goods store in Jackson Ward that opened earlier this year.
Like the handful of bends that dominate the neon sign making world, Kottwitz takes the options in front of her to plan a masterpiece. Uptown Neon’s future might be as twisting, turning and unpredictable up close as the track of an electrified tube of gas, but the planning of an expert makes the big picture come together in the end.
Kottwitz is sure of one thing the future holds: Uptown Neon’s name is here to stay. “It’s got so much great history,” she says. “I’m here because it’s Uptown Neon; it’s not here because of me.”
Video by David Ballowe
Lights Out
Neon signs have highlighted Richmond nightscapes for decades. Here are some gone-but-not-forgotten favorites.
Joy Garden Sign (1957-2017)
Now the location of Kismet Modern Indian restaurant on Broad Street, the once-oldest Chinese restaurant in Richmond had a towering pillar with multicolor tubes spelling the name of the establishment. The sign’s neon elements were removed two years before the restaurant’s closing.
Byram’s Lobster House Sign (1943-2012)
Broad Street’s brightest lobster sat in front of the West End seafood restaurant for about 70 years, greeting drivers with a red hue until a change in ownership in the early 2010s led to the sign going AWOL. Its whereabouts are still unknown.
“Rock ’n’ Roll Hotel” Sign (1982/1983)
The “lost” movie played a significant role in Richmond’s film history and required a sizable blue and pink “Rock & Roll” neon sign for the titular hotel, complete with flashing stars and guitars. The sign was placed above The Jefferson’s entrance on Grace Street, where the film was shot.
Robin Inn Sign (1964-2022)
Even recent transplants may have caught this sign in situ at the neighborhood restaurant on Robinson Street. In its place today is Stanley’s, a sandwich shop whose owners called on Uptown Neon to create signs for their bay window referencing the border shape of the original.
