AURORA | Corky Scholl’s friends have taken to blaming him for their nearly running lights and narrowly avoiding fender benders.
They chalk it up to their buddy’s signature cause. Scholl, founder and creative director of the preservation group “Save the Signs,” has opened their eyes to unlikely but important historical landmarks rendered of neon, glass and steel. These markers are easy to spot along major streets across the metro area, and they summon the style and craft of another age.
Rather than watching the road, Scholl has a growing army of people watching for retro marquees across the metro area.
The vintage signs that front old motels, restaurants and theaters up and down thoroughfares like East Colfax Avenue are easy to overlook. It took Scholl’s heartfelt campaigning to make his friends truly notice them, and there was no going back.
“Once people start noticing them, they can’t unnotice them,” Scholl said. “They see them everywhere … They are really beautiful works of art, created out solid materials — steel and neon and glass. They’re not like signs nowadays made out of plastic and cheap vinyl.”
A cruise down Colfax from Aurora after dark proves Scholl’s point. There’s the vivid marquee at the Aurora Fox theater; farther west across the Denver border, the bright lights outside the Satire Lounge, the Bluebird Theater and the Big Bunny Motel offer a window into another era.
They’re also threatened. Scholl started the nonprofit in 2012 after seeing several landmarks in Denver and Aurora disappear. Since formally launching the organization, he’s found support from different corners. The Aurora Cultural Arts District has signed on as a fiscal sponsor for the nonprofit, and earlier this year, 12 Colfax signs made the Colorado Preservation Inc.’s 2014 list of endangered places.
“Every year they put out a list of the most endangered places in Colorado,” Scholl said, explaining that the 12 signs were included in a single nomination. “They accepted the nomination. It gets us the ability to get funding and creates a lot of attention for those sites.”
Signposts in front of the Satire Lounge and Bastien’s steakhouse in bright reds, yellows and blues have come to define Colfax Avenue, the longest continuous street in the United States. The signs outside the dozens of motels speak to the road’s former role as a U.S. highway. The marquees hint at its status as the go-to strip for entertainment. The shining lights outside countless restaurants and lounges speak to the strip’s longtime status as the metro area’s best bet for food and drinks.
They’re a part of the landscape for anyone who knows the area, but their numbers are decreasing. Since Scholl moved to Denver from Minneapolis several years ago, he’s already seen plenty of these landmarks disappear. Vintage neon signs in front of the Aurora motels that stood across the street from the former Fitzsimons Army Hospital went away with the arrival of the sprawling Anschutz medical campus. The neon martini glass that stood in front of the old Mozart Lounge off Colfax and Krameria Street disappeared after the dive bar closed in 2012.
“Not only are they works of art, but they cost thousands of dollars to make,” Scholl said. “Why would you just discard them like that?”
Scholl and his peers are working to make sure the signs don’t get dumped with the arrival of a new megastore or housing development. Along with support from ACAD and Colorado Preservation Inc., Scholl has found allies in local galleries and longtime champions of Colfax culture. The Collection gallery in Aurora volunteered to display the sign from Sid’s Crazy Horse Bar. Jonny Barber, former spokesman for Aurora’s arts district and creator of cultural website colfaxavenue.com, has signed on as a spokesman and activist for the burgeoning nonprofit.
“There have been tourists and musicians I’ve met from Europe who talk about how glad they are that we’re doing something about these signs,” said Barber, who’s also fronted local bands and worked as Colorado’s go-to Elvis impersonator. “When they plan a trip out here, they want to see stuff like this. They want to see Americana.”
It’s the same reason tourists from around the world flock to drive the old Route 66 route, Barber added. They travel thousands of miles to see these signs, vintage landmarks that have become an invisible part of the backdrop for too many locals.
Reach reporter Adam Goldstein at 720-449-9707 or agoldstein@aurorasentinel.com