Story: Tammy Kwan, The Georgia Straight
Photo: Justin Langlois
The City of Vancouver’s Public Art Program and Sustainability Group has just unveiled a new piece of public art at the south edge of False Creek, and it’s both eye-catching and thought-provoking.
Should I Be Worried? is a neon text artwork installed on a disused industrial wooden beam structure produced by local artist Justin Langlois, as part of the City’s first Artist-in-Residence program.
Story: Peter Saunders, Sign Media Canada
Cover Photo: Ocean Peak Studios
TDH Experiential Fabricators of Surrey, B.C., has recreated the iconic neon rooster sign for Sai Woo, a restaurant in Vancouver’s Chinatown. It joins other historic landmarks that have returned to East Pender.
Salli Paterman, Sai Woo’s owner, launched a KickStarter campaign called ‘Bright Lights, Van City’ to raise the $18,712 necessary to replace the sign. She teamed up with Troy Hibbs, managing partner for TDH, and his brother Andrew, Vancouver’s youngest neon bender, to recreate the design based on a single video frame from footage shot in 1959.
Story By: Nicolle Hodges, Montecristo Magazine
Photo by: Ocean Peak Studios
Troy Hibbs oversees his shop, TDH Experiential Fabricators, where his brother Andrew is a neon bender: an abstract vocation by today’s standards, but not so uncommon in the 1950s. For a decade, Vancouver saw 19,000 signs cast their glow across the city, the wet downtown streets reflecting colourful fluorescent lights. Some thought the effect diminished Vancouver’s natural beauty, which prompted an anti-neon crusade in the late 1960s. In the years to come, signs were systematically dismantled and storefronts were darkened.
Among those lost was the Sai Woo rooster, with its broad chest and open wings, that greeted patrons outside the popular Chinatown restaurant. The chop suey house is mentioned in the infamous murder trial of the Hughes Gang as the place where the four boys went to drink a bottle of rum after killing Yoshi Uno in 1942.
Story By: Cheyrl Chan, Vancouver Sun
Photo by: Ocean Peak Studios
For the first time in almost 60 years, the distinctive green-and-yellow neon rooster once again reigns over Sai Woo in Vancouver’s Chinatown.
The only image restaurant owner Salli Pateman had of the original sign that used to grace the original Sai Woo on 158 East Pender St. was a brief clip on a YouTube video that her friend sent her of a Chinatown parade in 1958.