The Neon King of New Orleans

If New Orleans has a siren song, it’s neon. The Hotel Monteleone’s signature rooftop sign smolders red against the skyline. Tropical Isle’s sinister green beckons revelers to brave its Hand Grenade cocktail. Retro pink script scrawls above the columns of the Uptown diner Camellia Grill, and the Joy Theater’s marquee electrifies Canal Street with nostalgic romance. But the art undergirding all that neon is a dying one.

That’s where Nate Sheaffer comes in. Since opening his shop, Big Sexy Neon, in 2020, he’s worked to save the city’s historic signs and its luminous aesthetic, tinkering with century-old glass or crafting brand-new tubing, as well as designing his own flashy pieces. The workspace, recently relocated to nearby Metairie and filled floor to ceiling with his eye-popping originals, demands a visit. There you might find him wielding canisters of argon and krypton, beads of mercury, welding torches, and enough voltage to murder a moose.

“I should be dead,” Sheaffer says, his broad six-foot-five frame bent over the tiny jumper cables he attaches to high-voltage transformers that set the neon alight with a jolt. “I once got electrocuted so badly, the blast dislocated my shoulder.” His commissions come with other dangers: Dealing with historic landmarks in New Orleans can set off explosive reactions, too.

Take Tujague’s. The city’s second oldest restaurant had to relocate a few blocks away on Decatur Street in 2020, and last year, the owners removed its landmark, enormous neon sign. A furious preservationist army united online. Reddit threads glowed red. Finally, the pressure prevailed, and the Tujague’s sign secured a safe, permanent future; private donors sent it to Sheaffer for refurbishing, and it now burns inside the Southern Food and Beverage Museum.

Sheaffer has understandably, then, quickly become a city fixture. Born and raised in Pennsylvania, the youngest of eight children, the artist describes his youth as financially poor but educationally rich. “My dad was a machinist for the railway equipment company,” he explains. “I saw my parents make and repair everything.” At UNC–Chapel Hill, he switched his studies from physics to arts, and professor and artist Jerry Noe introduced Sheaffer to the craft of American neon. After running neon shops in North Carolina over several decades, though, “it was a woman who took me to New Orleans,” he admits with a laugh. “It didn’t hurt that this city has incredible neon history.”

That history began with neon’s discovery in 1898. Sign makers were filling tubes with the noble gas a little more than a decade later. And “it’s still done the same way,” Sheaffer says. Even better, “it’s totally sustainable. I can reuse everything I need from old signs.” And though you can use any of the noble gases—including argon, krypton, xenon, and helium—to illuminate tubing, neon was the name that stuck. “By the 1950s, New Orleans had more neon than Las Vegas. Canal Street had six hundred signs within a few blocks.”

Sheaffer’s a storyteller, and an appreciation of history runs through his personal pieces, too. For many of those works, he adorns found ephemera—reclaimed wood, children’s toys, old advertisements—with neon accents. He has exhibited nationally, and while there’s been a resurgence of the art, the future is dimmer for signage.

“To learn neon takes a decade, to become proficient,” he explains, “so it’s not a career people can intensely study any longer. Few offer apprenticeships. Plus, China took over beer sign production in the late nineties. Now everything is LED. It’s cheaper and faster to produce, but just garbage when it breaks. Maintained neon signs will last a hundred years or more.”

Standing on his butcher-paper sketches that litter the floor at Big Sexy Neon, Sheaffer demonstrates how he heats, blows, and bends the glass. A stage called aging requires a drop of liquid mercury to coax the color, and then he finishes with those tiny jumper cables that nearly killed him.

In addition to his own pieces, Sheaffer accepts commissions, and I can’t resist. I drop off a throwback 1930s toy ray gun. Two weeks later, he installs it over my powder room sink. He’s mounted the toy on a dark base, angled upward. We flip the switch. Neon zaps from the gun in red lightning bolts, with blue, concentric blast circles. I sound a hearty “pew pew!” and we clap like kids.