Friday, Aug 8, 2008
Exploding with color, optimism and razzle-dazzle, the now-extinct Holiday Inn "Great Sign" was a true design landmark of the American century.
Apr 29, 2002 | The American South likes to sequester its vice, tucking away temptation on barge-casinos or inside the lap-dance palaces out on the strip leading to the airport. As for roadside attractions, there's nothing that gets the blood racing like a motor court on the other side of the state line. As a Tennessee debutante of my acquaintance once explained, "Mississippi motels are where Memphis goes to sin." Could anything be more wicked than Magic Fingers and rates by the hour?
Apparently not in the Bible Belt. Yet it was a Memphis company named Holiday Inn that became a global brand by polishing the roadside hostel's image as a place where one got a good night's sleep and not a right good rogering. The company's mission was embodied by its "Great Sign," a glowing, exploding supernova of light and neon built to draw drivers off the highway and into its rooms while spelling out the purity of both its ideals and its bed sheets.
"Holiday Inn's sign was a prop in a play," says Andrew Wood, professor of communication studies at San Jose State University and an authority on motel history. "It communicated the playfulness, fantasy and optimism of the American roadside. And it meant safety for the [traveling] middle class."
The Great Sign was brash, bold and a masterpiece. It is also, alas, extinct. The company ripped them down in a bid to be a little more upscale.
Fifty years old this year, Holiday Inn is now a cultural touchstone without its icon. Few people recall or care about the company architecture, but everyone remembers the sign. Designed by the Cummings Company of Nashville, the signs were bright as blazes, built to be visible from Dwight Eisenhower's new interstate highway system.
Their marquees sported an emerald green curvilinear field with a big white neon "HOLIDAY INN" done in casual script. This was affixed to a red pylon atop which a yellow star exploded its energy into the night. Meanwhile a winking Vegas-style arrow pointed tired travelers to the office while an illuminated window box below advertised rates and local gatherings such as "Opaloosa Elks Fish Fry" or "Welcome Burlington High Senior Prom." The kinetic radiance turned the Great Sign into a symbol of American razzle-dazzle, for-sure-buddy-can-do optimism. To borrow a turn of phrase from President John F. Kennedy, another icon of the times, "the glow from that flame can truly light the world."
And it all started with a summer vacation from hell.
In 1951, Kemmons Wilson, a Memphis entrepreneur, took a family trip to Washington, D.C., and was appalled at the choice of fleabags on offer: Greasy motels, low-rent tourist camps and by-the-week boarding houses filled with persons of ill repute and encyclopedia salesmen.
The Wilson family's dilemma was not an exceptional one. Like Rizzo, the fast girl in "Grease," the motel industry developed a reputation early in life. The modern mo(tor) (ho)tel started in the 1920s as mom-and-pop motor courts for the auto pioneers traversing America in their tin lizzies. The courts were usually set on a town's outskirts and featured a cluster of small cabins. Their anonymity made them favorite trysting places (known in the industry as the "hot trade") or hideouts. Bonnie and Clyde were frequent guests. The hostels' Petri-dish potential for breeding lust and larceny alarmed FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, who demonized motor courts as "camps of crime" in a 1940 magazine article.
Wilson's idea was to get the sleaze out. He built a series of identical motels within a day's drive of each other that were intended to deliver a standardized experience, including clean sheets, air conditioning and a Bible in the bureau drawer. Throw in a pool for the kids and TV for adults (or was it the other way around?). A draftsman who had seen a 1942 Bing Crosby film penciled a name atop the blueprints: "Holiday Inn." The first one opened on Summer Avenue in Memphis, Tenn., in 1952, near what would become Graceland.
The beacon and the bait was, of course, the Great Sign. It lured station wagons into the parking lot as confidently as the Pharos lighthouse, that wonder of the ancient world, guided galleys into Alexandria's harbor.
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