Photos: See San Francisco’s Most Spectacular Neon Signs
San Francisco is awash in neon, the atmospheric glow of electrified noble gases inside glass tubes that bathe our sidewalks in ethereal shades of orange, red and blue.
The city used to be graced with even more of the cinematic light source—the Market Street and Broadway corridors, in particular, buzzed with neon. But starting in the 1970s, affordable, easy-to-maintain light-emitting diodes (LEDs) came into popular use, leading to neon’s decline.