Growing up, seeing a neon Paul Revere ride his red horse through the sky meant that Eve Hartig was almost home.
The same image enchanted generations of kids from New Bedford since the late 1940s, when Revere Copper and Brass Inc. installed a 40-foot by 25-foot neon sign on a factory roof. By the time Hartig was born, the sign had a new perch over Interstate 195.
Then, one day in 2014, the sign disappeared.
“It’s strange. I miss it,” said Hartig, 26, an artist who once brought the sign’s two-tone animation back to life in a hand-drawn cartoon. “On Google Maps, you can go back in time and drive down the street and see it, and sometimes I do that.”
As the U.S. nears the 250th anniversary of its Revolutionary War, the Revere sign remains a city icon in exile, visible in only a few fleeting traces. It appears in the corner of a mural downtown, and on t-shirts and sweatshirts sold at a local skateshop.
The sign itself is sitting in a repair shop near Boston.
The shop’s founder, Dave Waller, said he likely saved the sign from destruction when he purchased what remained of it in 2017.
After nearly a decade, he’s still waiting for the right buyer to come along.
The birth of an icon
That Paul Revere ever became an icon in New Bedford is strange to Waller. Revere’s famous midnight ride, when he warned Boston that the British were coming, happened while New Bedford was still an obscure, remote village.
“I’m not sure there’s evidence that Paul Revere was ever even in New Bedford,” Waller said.
After the war, Revere founded a copper mill that would eventually connect him to New Bedford, long after his death. His mill in Canton, Mass. became an early national defense contractor, manufacturing copper sheathing to line the bottom of wooden naval vessels.
The company expanded in the 19th and 20th centuries, merging with a New Bedford factory and others in Taunton, Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit and Rome, New York. By World War II, Revere Copper and Brass Inc. employed over 1,200 workers in New Bedford alone.
The company commissioned its iconic neon sign in 1948, according to the city’s newspaper, the Standard-Times. C.I. Brink Inc., the same firm that built Boston’s famous Citgo sign, hung 126 neon tubes on a purely copper frame, an anomaly among the hundreds of neon signs Waller has repaired.
Despite its durable materials and master craftsmanship, the sign only lasted about two decades on the roof of the New Bedford factory. Revere Copper had disconnected the lights by 1970, according to a Standard-Times article from 1995.
The company fell on hard times that decade. It was a heavy polluter adapting to new environmental regulations as competitors opened cheaper factories overseas. By 1994, the workforce had dwindled to around 200 employees, and the company gave up any hope of repairing the battered neon sign honoring its founder.
A team of local contractors hired to remove the sign initially planned to scrap it as part of their compensation, according to Richard Poyant, a New Bedford sign manufacturer.
But they never followed through, Poyant said. Instead, they contacted his family business and a New Bedford historic preservation firm, which worked together to refurbish the sign with government funds and private donations.
“They realized that this had meaning to the city,” Poyant said.
The City of New Bedford became the sign’s new owner, installing it in 1998 next to a municipal water tower overlooking Interstate-195.
But the initial enthusiasm waned, Poyant said, and the city allowed his maintenance contract to expire without renewal. The sign fell into disrepair again.
“It just became more expensive than the city could afford,” he said.
Poyant helped remove the sign in 2014, breaking it into pieces to be hauled away for storage.
Dave Waller found them three years later, laying outdoors behind the city waterworks in nearby Rochester. He bought what remained of the sign for $5,000.
“People were licking their chops over the copper, which wasn’t even worth that much,” Waller said. “When we took it away, there were a lot of snakes that were making an encampment underneath it that we had to gracefully shoo out of the way.”
The factory was gone too. It closed in 2007, leaving empty buildings beside a polluted river.
Searching for a new home
At first, Waller hoped the sign might find a buyer near Boston. He tried the museum at Revere’s old copper mill in Canton, and various locations along his midnight ride. Nothing panned out.
Waller reassembled part of the sign at Neon Williams, his shop in Somerville, hoping to entice a savior.
Revere’s red face, yellow hair, and half of his blue tricorner hat still light up. The remaining tubes lie in storage drawers. Waller got them from a duplicate sign at Revere Copper’s surviving factory in Rome, New York. The company had swapped out the neon for cheaper LED lights.
Waller said his shop could rebuild the sign for $125,000 — a fraction of the $500,000 estimate reported by the Standard-Times when the sign came down.
The harder challenge, he said, is finding a public place to put it with a stable caretaker.
If it hangs outdoors, Waller said he would expect a commitment to fund consistent maintenance, which he said his shop could provide for an annual contract of about $5,000.
Then, around the twenty-year mark, the sign would return to a familiar crossroads: is the public willing to invest in a major refurbishment?
