Sign of the times

Attached to a wall in Dame Lane, just off Dublin's South Great George's Street, is a man's head and neck. He has been there for almost 40 years. His happiness depends on the state of his scalp: when he sports a full head of hair, he beams. When he is bald, his smile is replaced by a frown. His emotions and hairiness change every few seconds: smile, frown; smile, frown. Shaped by glass tubes, filled with neon gas and dependent on a complicated system of transformers, timers and electric wires, his glowing face has endeared him to Dubliners for years. Underneath his carefully crafted collar and tie, curling yellow neon asks Why go Bald? This neon sign, put in place to advertise the Universal Hair and Scalp Clinic, has not shone for the past few months. Some of the delicate glass tubing is cracked and damaged and the electrics have to be overhauled. In short, a large part of the sign needs to be remade - a painstaking operation, and, at a cost of £5,000, prohibitively expensive for the management of the clinic. Missing the luminous sight of the Why go Bald man and his ever-changing moods, members of the Twentieth Century Trust (an organisation dedicated to saving modern Irish heritage) approached the director of the Universal Clinic, Ann Goldsmith, to plead for the sign's life.

Ann knew that people were fond of the sign, but decided to test the depth of their feelings through one of the most effective opinion-gathering methods open to any Irish man, woman or child: she talked to Gerry Ryan live on 2FM, and asked the radio audience two simple questions: 1. Should the sign stay or go? 2. Where would the money come from to fix it?

The response was massive. Many people called the Gerry Ryan Show and the Universal Clinic with a straightforward answer to Q.1: yes, yes, yes, the sign should stay. The cash question was a little more complicated, but last week Joe Taylor, director of Taylor Signs, responded. No money would be needed, he said, because he would ensure that the sign would be fixed in Taylor's workshops free of charge.

The great show of affection for the sign, as with the response to the demolition of Archer's Garage, emphasises that "heritage" has a far broader meaning than might be presumed. It is usually thought to mean the preservation of ancient or traditional material culture or beautiful monuments to be contemplated at leisure. Neon lighting seems almost opposite to this: it is unashamedly commercial and modern, and relies on technology and a quick flashing message for its impact. The story of Why go Bald has a pleasing narrative symmetry: it was designed, manufactured and erected by Taylor Signs in 1962, and thence it returns to be made good to shine for at least the next 20 years.

Joe Taylor's father, Fred, and his three brothers established their company in 1935 following a trip to America, where they went to find out what the "next big thing" in business was. At the time of their visit, a particular patent restricting the manufacture of neon to those who could afford the franchise had recently expired, and there was an explosion in the number of illuminated sign-makers. The records of the New York Sign Permit Bureau give some idea of the scale of the industry: in 1933, there were almost 17,000 neon signs in the boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn alone.

Why go Bald was made during the boom era for neon in Dublin. As with other cities, Dublin had one particular area, O'Connell Street, marked as a modern entertainment district, where clubs, ice-cream parlours and cinemas were situated and where, for advertisers, night-time could be made as commercially viable as day through the use of neon signs. It was there, and in the area around O'Connell Bridge, that saw the greatest concentration of neon in the 1950s and 1960s, with the Donnelly Sausages sign of Westmoreland Street remembered as a particularly spectacular example of motion, colour and light.

Eamonn Conlon, who has been working for Taylor's since before Why Go Bald was made, reasons that the apparent lack of such large-scale neon signs in Dublin now is due to "more stringent planning regulations". This certainly seems to be the case: in the Dublin City Development Plan 1999, the section on illuminated signage stipulates that signs should "be sympathetic to the building" and that neon tubular strip is "generally not acceptable".

When I spoke to Dick Gleeson, the deputy city planning officer, he suggested that "sympathetic" is a fairly broad term, and can mean a lot of things. He is not against neon per se, citing its use in two Temple Bar buildings, Arthouse and the IFC, as particularly good recent examples. Of the Why Go Bald sign, he said "there's all sorts of oddities out there". And this is possibly the crux: it is not only beautiful monuments and magnificent buildings that make cities interesting and exciting, but such "oddities" as a small survivor from the twentieth century, blinking on and off down a narrow Dublin lane-way.

The Twentieth Century Trust can be contacted at 20thcenturytrust@ireland.com