The Casa Barelas sign is one of the few signs FOS worked on that stands off Central Avenue (old Route 66), this one at 1024 Fourth Street SW in the Barelas neighborhood. Courtesy FOS
The Royal Motel was demolished in 2007, but its sign remains and got a little creative restoration through Friends of the Orphan Signs and the community.ÌýCourtesy FOS
The “Revivir†sign was designed and revamped by Ellen Babcock, Bethany Delahunt, Lindsey Fromm, and Aline Hunziker with help from Highland students Hilary Weir, Gabe Thompson, and Desiree Marmon. It used to stand at 4119 Central Avenue NE; it will soon be on display at the new Route 66 Visitor’s Center in Albuquerque. Courtesy FOS
Some of the signs FOS revamped and re-created come with poems or messages about social justice, like this one that speaks of trans rights.ÌýCourtesy FOS
The Casa Barelas sign is one of the few signs FOS worked on that stands off Central Avenue (old Route 66), this one at 1024 Fourth Street SW in the Barelas neighborhood. Courtesy FOS
The Royal Motel was demolished in 2007, but its sign remains and got a little creative restoration through Friends of the Orphan Signs and the community.ÌýCourtesy FOS
Some of the signs FOS revamped and re-created come with poems or messages about social justice, like this one that speaks of trans rights.ÌýCourtesy FOS
Stand close enough, and you’ll hear the old pylon sign at 6724 Central Avenue NE in Albuquerque creak. The sign stands on an empty lot, and nothing around it stops the wind from whipping through it — not the other empty lot to its left or the rundown motel on the right.
The old sign sits in an area the city renamed the “International District;†locals still refer to this neighborhood as the “war zone.â€
The closest major intersection to the pylon sign is where Central meets Louisiana. It’s also one of the most dangerous intersections for pedestrians and cyclists in the country. But once upon a time, this area was a happening part of town, ablaze with neon signs and crowds of tourists.
If you look at it from on high, perhaps on Google Earth, you can see where the original business that the pylon sign advertised once stood. In person, it’s a little more difficult to discern, as concrete and sand as well as overgrowth hide some of the ghost building’s lines. Property records and listings speak of foreclosure, of a fire incident, maybe, and of a would-be former owner who, if alive, would now be 102 years old.
This sign, which you may never have even noticed with its yellow panel ripped to shreds, is one of dozens of empty and rickety signs perched on Central Avenue that speak to the city’s heyday when nearly every business along Route 66 (or Central) had its own neon calling card. Many of the motels and other businesses on Route 66, and their signs, reflected post-WWII Googie architecture, which originated in California and boasted futuristic elements influenced by the Atomic Age and America’s car culture.
The “Revivir†sign was designed and revamped by Ellen Babcock, Bethany Delahunt, Lindsey Fromm, and Aline Hunziker with help from Highland students Hilary Weir, Gabe Thompson, and Desiree Marmon. It used to stand at 4119 Central Avenue NE; it will soon be on display at the new Route 66 Visitor’s Center in Albuquerque. Courtesy FOS
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“It’s kind of amazing how good we are at ignoring them,†says artist and art educator Lindsey Fromm of these now decrepit emblems of a bygone era. “When there’s nothing in them, they become skeletons on the landscape.â€
Fromm is the new executive director of Friends of the Orphan Signs, a creative nonprofit founded in 2010 by Ellen Babcock, an associate art professor at the University of New Mexico. The organization has a mission to revamp Central Avenue’s old pylon and neon signs, like the one at 6724 Central, and turn them into permanent public art. In January, the National Endowment for the Arts announced Friends of the Orphan Signs — known as FOS — as one of its 19 New Mexico-based grantees for 2025.
The $20,000 grant is a big deal for Friends of the Orphan Signs. The funds will allow the nonprofit to revamp two signs in time for the Route 66 centennial in 2026 and pay the artists who will work on them.
In Albuquerque, a large section of old Route 66 traverses an area of town that is sketchy at best. Seeing a beautiful old sign that’s been given new life in an otherwise neglected and overgrown lot can take you by surprise.
That is what happened to Fromm when she moved to Albuquerque from California. “I came here to do a graduate program,†she says. “I didn’t know anyone, and I was taking the bus a lot, and I saw a reader board on Central that was on an empty lot. Someone was putting messages up on it. The messages were beautiful, obscure, strange. I didn’t know where they had come from, what they referred to. The one that I always mention because I loved it so much was, ‘I clap for you in my head all the time.’â€
The particular sign Fromm is referring to was built in 1958 for the then-new Trade Winds Motor Hotel at the corner of Central and San Mateo. It screamed Googie with its arrow-like vertical wings, of which the top one was chopped some years later for being too tall. The sign was made, like most others in town, by Zeon, the oldest and largest sign maker in Albuquerque.
Lindsey Fromm from Friends of the Orphan Signs, a 2025 grantee of the National Endowment for the Arts, shares lessons learned about the application process. Michelle Laflamme-Childs discusses what NEA partnership grants are and why New Mexico Art does what it does.
In 2009, the Safe City Strike Force targeted the motel and the city demolished it, but not the sign. Babcock and her cohort of students from UNM collected messages to display on the sign from people who were waiting for the bus nearby, as well as text poetry from locals via a phone number, and even held poetry workshops at Highland High School a few blocks away. Those efforts resulted in not only “I clap for you in my head all the time†but also verses like “First of all you have to keep your boots clean†and “Homesick ghosts keep you awake.†The sign was demolished a few years later when a new owner took over the lot and replaced it with a somewhat clumsy replica.
With funding FOS received from the City of Albuquerque Public Art Program, the organization revamped “Revivir,†a neon sign at 4119 Central Avenue NE, and collaborated once more with Highland students, incorporating the artwork of high schoolers Hilary Weir, Gabe Thompson, and Desiree Marmon. The project won the city’s 2013 Public Art Year in Review Outstanding Public Project Award. The lot was bought some years later and the sign taken down, although it wasn’t destroyed and will be put on display at the Route 66 Visitor’s Center set to open in 2025.
Some signs FOS turned into public art haven’t been touched. The Sundowner sign, at 6101 Central Avenue NE, for instance, has neon arrows on one side and the photo of a lion’s head on the other. It stands by the state fairgrounds and right on the edge of the “war zone.†Friends of the Orphan Signs redesigned it in partnership with the residents of New Life Homes, an affordable housing complex at the same address and where the old Sundowner Motel once stood (and coincidentally, where in 1975 Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft).
Other signs they redesigned include “Keywords†(also “Caravan East Nightclubâ€) at 7605 Central Avenue NE; “Revision†at 4501 Central Avenue NE; “Keepsake,†just west of Washington and Central, right next to the sign “Revivirâ€; and several off Central too, like “Casa Barelas†at 1024 Fourth Street SW and “Seedling†at Sixth Street and Mountain.
“I’ve been doing a bunch of research into why so many of these empty signs still exist,†Fromm says. “Why are these old signs still standing on properties that don’t have a building anymore? Or on properties that have a boarded-up building? Or why are there signs that don’t advertise the thing that’s on the property. Well, there’s a historical precedent here.â€
In 1976, the City of Albuquerque passed a “visual noise†ordinance. “The ordinance basically restricted the height, the scale, the closeness to the street, and the ability for animation for all future signs being made,†Fromm says. “All signs that were made before 1976 could stay the way they were, but any new signs had to be a lot smaller in height, in size, and they couldn’t be as bright and couldn’t have flashing animated aspects to them. I spoke to a sign business owner who said, ‘Well, after that ordinance, there were no new iconic signs being made in Albuquerque.’â€
Around 2008, a new law was established to help re-beautify Central Avenue. “An overlay zone was put into law,†she says. “And so now, anyone along Central Avenue, if they want to make a sign that includes neon, or something that is neon-like, then they get a suite of privileges that allows them to supersede the underlying 1976 ordinances that were so restrictive on the signage.â€
With funds from this year’s NEA grant, FOS will redesign two signs that are in Nob Hill and just outside Old Town and will, as it has in the past, partner with community organizations.
For the Nob Hill sign, FOS will collaborate with United Voices for Newcomer Rights, a nonprofit founded in 2015 by refugee and newcomer families as well as by UNM students and community advocates. UVNR works with asylum seekers, refugees, and other immigrants to help improve their lives as they settle into their new country of residence.
Most people don’t notice the Nob Hill sign, because for a long time, it was painted gray and blended into the urban landscape. However, it will soon stand out as not only a creative addition to beautify Albuquerque’s historic neighborhood, but also to serve as a form of expression for people whose voices are otherwise being silenced.Ìý
