There’s an old showbiz saying: you have to go away to come back. It’s shocking now, but there were multiple attempts to tear down the Las Vegas sign. It had been placed in 1959 on Route 91 from Los Angeles—the road that became the Strip—but by the early 1970s, Interstate 15 had bypassed it entirely. The old sign stood dark, a relic from another era on the edge of town, facing mostly wide-open desert. In a city that’s short on sentimentality, it seemed doomed.

But John Woodrum, a nearby motel owner, watched people race over to photograph the sign. He ran a power line to it and fired it up himself. It remains lit to this day, powered by solar panels since 2014. None of the people who planned the original Strip—and none of the people who later commissioned the sign—could have dreamed it would become a beloved global icon, synonymous with the city.

The sign’s designer, Betty Willis, combined space-age Googie motifs (starbursts, asymmetry, boomerangs) with the outline of the Goodyear Tire logo to create the sign, with the circles behind WELCOME as silver dollars. Willis, one of eight children, had grown up in Las Vegas in the first two-story home built there. She never copyrighted the logo or profited from it, saying, “It’s my gift to the city.” Her tombstone has a recreation of the sign that reads, simply, WELCOME HOME.

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Special thanks to Sean Slattery for suggesting the Las Vegas sign.

Links:

• Googie: Architecture of the Space Age – Matt Novak, Smithsonian Magazine, June 15, 2012

  
  

• A Brief History of the Welcome Sign – The Neon Museum, Las Vegas, January 2, 2019

  
  

• Betty Willis, Whose ‘Fabulous’ Sign Defined Las Vegas, Dies at 91 – Sam Roberts, The New York Times, April 22, 2015

This post is part of The American 250, a series featuring 250 objects made by Americans, located in America, in honor of the country's 250th anniversary. 250 words on 250 works, from January 1 to December 31, 2026.

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