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You’ll find insignias from some familiar spots like Henry’s Tacos and Bob’s Big Boy, but the neon and backlit collection is mostly a collection of Valley bygones: country western club the Palomino, mostly-vanished fast food chain Pioneer Chicken and Woodland Hills spot My Brother’s Bar-B-Q (three-dimensional cow sign included).
NEON DRIVE NI FULL
The museum’s hangar full of illuminated signage is easily its most visually impressive asset. But just anyone can actually carefully remove the neon, bring the sign down, transport it, get it safe and then restore it.” Photograph: Time Out/Michael Juliano Photograph: Time Out/Michael Juliano Photograph: Time Out/Michael Juliano Anyone can take down a sign for a few hundred bucks.
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“And when something’s donated, it takes time and money to hire a crane and bring a crew down. “I pretty much have saved every item personally by hand,” he says. In those cases, there’s a pretty good chance the museum already has postcards and photos to document the history of the item, and oftentimes Gelinas is scooping up the artifacts himself. A lot of the items that enter into the museum’s collection are donated, many times from celebrities’ and business owners’ surviving family members. Unlike a Post-Impressionist masterpiece, its acquisition and authentication process tends to be a bit more straightforward. Now, though, the Valley Relics Museum sure is.
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“The Valley’s history is really important history, it’s very interesting history. “I always tell people, it’s not Van Gogh,” Gelinas says. But there wasn’t really any sort of shrine to that story of the Valley.
NEON DRIVE NI MOVIE
It was go-karts and BMX tracks, record stores and themed restaurants, film studios and movie star residents, hot rods and airplanes, and sparkling swimming pools alongside empty ones that’d been converted into skateparks. For Gelinas, though, growing up in the Valley was so much more than that. Photograph: Time Out/Michael Juliano Photograph: Time Out/Michael Juliano Tommy Gelinasįor out-of-towners and Basin-dwelling Angelenos, the Valley’s reputation has often been unfairly distilled down to a few things: heat, adult entertainment and, like, grody-sounding Valspeak. As his collection of 20-foot-tall signs grew, he moved the museum in 2018 to its current home, a pair of spacious hangars at the Van Nuys Airport stuffed with cars, bikes, neon, arcade cabinets and celebrity memorabilia. In 2013, he first put his accumulation of mementos on display at the Valley Relics Museum’s first brick-and-mortar location in Chatsworth. Gelinas has been rescuing, collecting and preserving Valley-related ephemera for over two decades. If there’s a 20th-century local pop culture curiosity that’s vanished from L.A.’s San Fernando Valley, there’s a good chance some remaining shred of it has found a second life at this Lake Balboa museum. Between a wooden Taco Bell sign and an oil painting of Colonel Sanders, there’s a Jack in the Box clown head that you used to be able to yell your drive-through order into-at least until “the clowns might’ve freaked out one too many kids so in the late ’70s, early ’80s they started blowing up Jack.
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“This is like my childhood in a nutshell,” Valley Relics Museum founder Tommy Gelinas says as we survey a display of Southern California fast food curios.