Let There Be Neon, which celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2022, is packing up its longtime home at 38 White. The company was sold to a “lovely couple from Boston” who own a neon shop there, said owner Jeff Friedman.

“We will be moving,” Jeff said, “which we would have done anyway because maintaining a manufacturing location on the outskirts of Chinatown, I’m sorry, I mean Tribeca, has not been sustainable for many years now.”

“All employees will remain and the legend will continue,” he added.

I may be accused of overusing the phrase here — I last trotted it out for Gee Whiz — but this is truly the end of an era. LTBN must be one of the few manufacturing uses still in a loft building in the neighborhood — please correct me if I am wrong. The original founder of the company, Rudi Stern, started it in 1972 in Soho and moved here in 1984 for a lower rent. (Jeff would buy him out not long after.) The space has 15-foot ceilings and no columns and allows for the glass factory on the ground floor and basement.

(It is, of course, for rent, and you can see the listing here plus some storefront renderings. It would be really really great if the coop could keep the sign, and the new tenant thought that worked too — for the romance and the nostalgia and the glow.)

To follow are excerpts from Jeff’s “Spotlight” feature from 2022, which is really worth a read in its entirety:

“Let There Be Neon was definitely the first neon gallery ever and we were creating things that you now see every day. And when I say ‘we,’ it’s a collective process — there were contemporary artists working with neon who predate us. But when you think of the neon palm tree, the neon heart — that all came out of Let There Be Neon in the ’70s. You would not see that now if not for our work.”

The neighborhood, obviously, has changed since 1984 — and over the decades since has become less hospitable to manufacturing and small business in general as it converted more and more to residential. Jeff hits on some sticking points here:

“My first real gut feeling about it even on White Street, and this is going back years, was when they put those huge tree planters on the sidewalk. I think the main goal was keeping trucks off the streets because they had just bought a $5 million apartment.”

“We are a small business and we are trying to exist here, and now it’s impossible for us to even park our vehicle between the outdoor café things, which I agree with, but still. And the bigger problem is these people who work in the courts down the block and they have their own private vehicles with permits. My concern is someone who has a permit to use their private car – it’s just not cool. We got truck parking on the corner, and they just take these spots and you know no traffic officer is going to ticket them.”

“As a small business it’s really tough.”

My mentor in graduate school called reporting a “joyful entitlement,” and watching the glass molded at LTBN perfectly encapsulates that. [See the video below with master glass bender Ed Skrypa crafting a sign for Sweetgreen.] The workers there heat the glass until its soft, then coax it into the pattern to shape it. It gets filled with gas and then sealed. Electrodes at the ends provide a charge so that the gas molecules make light. As long as it is vacuum sealed, it will never change — there are 70-year-old working signs in the shop.

In 2022, Jeff said, “The future is bright, no pun intended. We didn’t know what was going on with covid for a while, but the business is healthy, we didn’t skip a beat, we are encouraged by what we are seeing, and the diversity of clients we have now gathered over the years — it really feels really good.

“We don’t own the space unfortunately but we have great landlord who we love and I know we are great tenants. It’s always been easy, both sides have been fair. Hopefully that continues.”

Sigh.