They don’t make ‘em like this anymore

Dusk is my favorite time to photograph neon — moreso than complete dark. The colors are just as vivid, but there’s less of that sharp contrast (and therefore glare) between the dark sky and the bright light.

I live about eight blocks from the Esquire Theatre, a movie theater that opened in 1940 and was converted to an IMAX theater in 1999. I’m a sucker for anything Art Deco (see my ongoing infatuation with the Tower Bridge here in Sacramento as an example — don’t worry, there’ll be a post on that later this week, AGAIN) and when it’s neon and Art Deco, well, I just can’t help but want to take pictures of it.

(If you’re really nit-picky about architectural history, the Esquire is technically Streamline Moderne, which some people say was a reaction to Art Deco, and others say is the tail end of Art Deco. Wikipedia calls it part of the late Art Deco period, and since this is my blog post, I’m going with that. End of discussion.) :-)

I trace my fascination with Art Deco to going to LA’s Union Station when I was much younger and on my way to New Mexico via train (seriously Mom and Dad, I still remember that train ride — thank you SO MUCH for taking us on that!!) and wanting to just stand and stare at everything in wonder. Even though I was all of five years old, something about the style really jumped out at me. The fact that it was a train station, therefore also fulfilling my love of all things transportation-related, made it even better.

Because I’m procrastinating on some grad school homework I should be doing, I dug up a couple of pictures from other websites to put before mine. Let me repeat — the first two pictures? NOT MINE. I think the age on the first one and the watermark on the second one should make that clear. Clicking on the pictures will take you to the pages I got them from.

Here's the Esquire the year it was built, in 1940. I love that "Some Like It Hot" is on the marquee, and I love the streetcar in front. I also love that there are still streetcars of a sort (light rail) that still run down K Street, albeit not in front of the Esquire.

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Here's the same area now, facing the opposite direction. See the Esquire? It's now been dwarfed by the skyscrapers, including the one built around it, appropriately named Esquire Tower. There's a blue neon thermometer-looking thing that runs up the side of the skyscraper (that glass corner of the building toward the front of the picture) that at night can be seen for miles around, including from the freeway if you're driving by on Business 80. Incidentally, those buildings there form a really weird and wicked wind canyon -- when I go running, I usually turn at that corner and run past the Esquire while heading to my customary lap around the Capitol, and it doesn't matter what the rest of the weather is like -- I almost always hit a wall of wind when I round that corner, or at least a nice breeze. Sometimes it's refreshing, sometimes it's downright chilling.

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I love that they kept the original front of the theater, but it makes me feel a bit melancholy, and makes me think of the kids’ book “The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge”. $5 says my mom will get misty-eyed when she reads that last sentence. :-) For a bit more sight-seeing in the above picture, the church dome in the background is the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament, and the tall black skyscraper on the far left is the Renaissance Tower, nicknamed the “Darth Vader Building” because of its appearance. When I first heard about the nickname, I immediately got why someone christened it that, and now I can’t look at it without thinking, “Luke, it is your DESTINY.” I’m a nerd. We all knew that, right?

Front of the theatre on a spring evening (these pictures are, er, from when I got this lens in May.) Hey, I mentioned I was trying to clear a backlog!

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I like the desaturated look -- makes me think of a faded picture, kind of like the very first one in the post (only, you know, in color instead of in black and white.)

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Have I mentioned how much I love living here? Because, yeah. I really really do.

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