Sign healed, deliver

By Sam Allis, Globe Columnist, 9/7/2003

Labor Day felt like leaf mold this year, and we now find ourselves back in the trenches at work and school. (Saul Steinberg, the late genius of The New Yorker magazine, once said, "First grade is a shock from which we never recover.") Never mind. It's a new year. (Jan. 1 is a hoax.) It's time to step back and examine Boston with fresh eyes once again.

The Observer is unamused by what he sees in Kenmore Square.

The CITGO sign looks like hell. The Boston landmark atop a building owned by Boston University appears to have been in a dogfight. The view from the Fenway Park side of the sign -- the only one that matters -- reveals big holes in the blue of the "G" and "O." Above, there are acres of dead horizontal space, like deletions in a censored text, amid the white background framing the relentless red triangle, called "the delta" in the trade. Said delta, in turn, has lost much of its lining. The same piece of geometry is in even worse shape on the reverse side of the 60-by-60-foot monolith facing the Back Bay.

This situation cannot stand. The CITGO sign must always be spectacular. It is, hands down, the most absorbing confection in our night sky. (Granted, that's not saying much.) And as installation art, it is surpassed only by the sinewy grace of the Zakim Bridge. Since 1965, when it acquired its current look, the sign has been distinguished for its simple elegance and mesmerizing kinetics. (It was originally built in 1940, when Cities Service Co. had a different logo. The Tulsa-based outfit is now called CITGO Petroleum Corp.) It deserves better than this.

Help is on the way. Robert Sawyer, who has maintained the sign since 1965, promises a return to greatness soon. His workers are finishing the installation of new cables and bearings, the replacement of safety lines. In a matter of weeks, he said last Wednesday, this unglamorous structural work will be done, and then it's on to the sign itself. Sawyer promises something "very extraordinary."

It's about time.

Sawyer blames the sign's sad condition on last winter's brutality. "There was huge snow, then extreme cold, then more snow," he says. "Because of the extreme cold, we needed to do a repair job, a temporary one, because it would be silly to make significant repairs without doing the structural work first. So in April, we did a repainting job, which was OK for the next couple of months."

The weather really is a bogeyman, confirms Steven Williams, second-generation owner of Allston-based Neon Williams, which has supplied the glass tubing for the sign for 30 years. "Remember that freak storm on April 1 a few years back?" he asks. "That knocked out 200 units in one shot." (A unit is about 7 feet of tubing. There are 1,572 of them in the sign, totaling about 11,000 feet of glass.)

Whatever the reason, the CITGO sign looked lousy all summer, when it should have radiated excellence onto Fenway and joy on the rest of town. Instead, Sox fans were treated to a wounded CITGO whenever we cast our eyes away from the hari-kari committed by the bullpen on the field. For shame. I hereby propose the first CITGO rule: The sign should look like a million bucks by Memorial Day. Every year.

What Sawyer has in mind is nothing less than the first overhaul since 1965. This means repainting all of it, including the blue behind the CITGO letters and the three shades of red behind the delta to make those colors look alive during the daytime, when the sign is quiet, and replacing all tubes that are broken or sketchy. (The sign lives from dusk until midnight each day.)

The folks at CITGO headquarters in Tulsa will sign off on the timing and dough for the overhaul, which could take place this fall or next spring, he says. The job will take a few weeks, and he promises to have the sign resplendent again for the baseball season.

Speaking of resplendence, just what do you do about the neon? And how do you make the colors in the first place? I turned to Williams, the neon god, for answers.

The reds come from neon, a gas transformed into that color when electrified. (I knew this?) There are three different reds in the delta: neon red, ruby red, and an orange "flame" that provides the pulsating 3-D effect. Neon red is simply neon electrified in clear glass tubing. Ruby red is electrified neon in tubing glass dyed red. The orange is a green-coated fluorescent tube with neon inside.

The blue, he tells me, is called "neo blue" in the trade. It is confected from blue fluorescent powder pumped by argon, a gas that turns blue when electrified, inside a double-coated tube of white inside blue. The white color, in turn, comes from white fluorescent powder pumped by argon through clear glass.

How extensive will the overhaul be? "I wouldn't be surprised if they did the whole thing," says Williams. "It depends on how much they want to spend. It would be an ongoing job to replace them all. To keep a crew up there, we'd need to give them 50 units a day."

So things are looking up. The CITGO sign matters in this town. Don't let anyone tell you different. When the sign pulsates in all of its considerable glory once again, stopping newcomers and veterans alike in their tracks, we will forget about the world around us and bask in the glow of Boston, Massachusetts.

Sam Allis's e-mail address is: allis@globe.com.