GoKawiilIf New Orleans has a siren song, it’s neon. The Hotel Monteleone’s signature rooftop sign smolders red against the skyline. Tropical Isle’s sinister green beckons revelers to brave its Hand Grenade cocktail. Retro pink script scrawls above the columns of the Uptown diner Camellia Grill, and the Joy Theater’s marquee electrifies Canal Street with nostalgic romance. But the art undergirding all that neon is a dying one.
Get Due South Our newsletter with Southern destinations and inspiration for your next trip This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
That’s where Nate Sheaffer comes in. Since opening his shop, Big Sexy Neon, in 2020, he’s worked to save the city’s historic signs and its luminous aesthetic, tinkering with century-old glass or crafting brand-new tubing, as well as designing his own flashy pieces. The workspace, recently relocated to nearby Metairie and filled floor to ceiling with his eye-popping originals, demands a visit. There you might find him wielding canisters of argon and krypton, beads of mercury, welding torches, and enough voltage to murder a moose.
Photo: BRYAN TARNOWSKI
“I should be dead,” Sheaffer says, his broad six-foot-five frame bent over the tiny jumper cables he attaches to high-voltage transformers that set the neon alight with a jolt. “I once got electrocuted so badly, the blast dislocated my shoulder.” His commissions come with other dangers: Dealing with historic landmarks in New Orleans can set off explosive reactions, too.
Take Tujague’s. The city’s second oldest restaurant had to relocate a few blocks away on Decatur Street in 2020, and last year, the owners removed its landmark, enormous neon sign. A furious preservationist army united online. Reddit threads glowed red. Finally, the pressure prevailed, and the Tujague’s sign secured a safe, permanent future; private donors sent it to Sheaffer for refurbishing, and it now burns inside the Southern Food and Beverage Museum.
Sheaffer has understandably, then, quickly become a city fixture. Born and raised in Pennsylvania, the youngest of eight children, the artist describes his youth as financially poor but educationally rich. “My dad was a machinist for the railway equipment company,” he explains. “I saw my parents make and repair everything.” At UNC–Chapel Hill, he switched his studies from physics to arts, and professor and artist Jerry Noe introduced Sheaffer to the craft of American neon. After running neon shops in North Carolina over several decades, though, “it was a woman who took me to New Orleans,” he admits with a laugh. “It didn’t hurt that this city has incredible neon history.”
That history began with neon’s discovery in 1898. Sign makers were filling tubes with the noble gas a little more than a decade later. And “it’s still done the same way,” Sheaffer says. Even better, “it’s totally sustainable. I can reuse everything I need from old signs.” And though you can use any of the noble gases—including argon, krypton, xenon, and helium—to illuminate tubing, neon was the name that stuck. “By the 1950s, New Orleans had more neon than Las Vegas. Canal Street had six hundred signs within a few blocks.”
Sheaffer’s a storyteller, and an appreciation of history runs through his personal pieces, too. For many of those works, he adorns found ephemera—reclaimed wood, children’s toys, old advertisements—with neon accents. He has exhibited nationally, and while there’s been a resurgence of the art, the future is dimmer for signage.
Photo: BRYAN TARNOWSKI
... continue reading