The huge Zenith sign at the old distribution center
 

You've seen this photo in my avatar before. I was in northlake yesterday and brought my camera along so I could get some better quality photos of this old sign. Like anything unused, its a matter of time before it gets taken down. Im surprized its still up. the north side for of the sign shows alot of wear and tear. It still displays great when driving down I-294. The building is now used by tribune direct and is another printer for the chicago tribune.

You can get an idea how large this sign is by comparing it to the 53' semi trailer in the back and by the car on the right of the sign. This sign is from atleast 1970 as I have a 1970 zenith phonograph pamphlet and this sign is on the front cover. Just to note, all those lamps are individual flood lights. A very expensive sign to light up!

I wonder if LG is aware of the sign, and if they are doing anything to see that it stays up there.

I wonder if the Chicago Tribune would talk to you about doing a human-interest article on it, and use their massive resources to research the sign a little (or maybe they did already -- check microfilms in a local library?). Might be worth a letter or email to the Tribune, or perhaps even a visit. I would really like to know the history of this sign. In another thread, we debated if this was the only one, or even the largest one, in Chicago -- I have strong memories of one looking somewhat different, except muddled by 40 years intervening, perhaps. Did the lights on this sign ever flash randomly? The one I remember, every floodlight flashed independently, a couple times a second, giving the overall effect not unlike "snow" on the screen of an old Zenith TV set. This one, as I recall when last it was lit, was not flashing.

but it WAS a brazillion years ago...

When I was growing up in Chicago back in the 60's and 70's, I recall Zenith having a factory somewhere on the west side. Was there another sign in that area? I also kind of remember that big sign on Rt.294 flashing.

Brrrrrrrzzzt ! That sound you hear is Commander Eugene F. McDonald, Jr. spinning in his grave over what's been done to his beloved Zenith...Lucky-Goldstar, indeed....

Don't think so.LG is retiring the Zenith name and only making new products under the LG name.

Really..? I've seen at least a few new Zenith-branded products showing up at Best Buy fairly recently. I'd be surprised that they'd actually retire the name though; I'd think the Zenith name would still have some value from a "brand goodwill" standpoint. Lots of people probably still don't realize that Zenith is actually LG/Goldstar.

Doug:

When I first saw the title of this thread, I thought your post was going to include a story of how you got the sign home and it's now in your front yard! Oh well. Maybe next time you take pictures of it, it WILL be in your front yard! :D

Maybe we should all pitch in and buy it! :D


polaraman

I bought my first digital TV last week. An LG, "made by Zenith" the salesman said (a major selling point to me). 30-inch widescreen CRT, weighs a TON. Brought it home, risked a hernia lifting it off the truck bed, brought it in, plugged it in, got this (photo). Nice purple zone! I put this photo on my iPaq and showed it to the front desk at Best Buy. They cheerfully exchanged the TV. Replacement (after 2nd drive home, 2nd lift off of truck, 2nd setup) is hanging in there. Hopefully the other one was a fluke...

I guess this post just follows up on Zenith's grand fall from grace, from the good old days. Can't imagine the real, American, Zenith letting THAT out the door...

- k

---

I think that would be a Zenith set made by LG. As far as I know Zenith no longer makes tv sets. Lucky Goldstar ( a Korean government subsidised company) bought the name and the remains of the company.

Bill R.

I think it makes sense to drop the Zenith name, and I've noticed it being phased-out as well.

LG is expanding into major home appliances, keep in mind they already make cell-phones. They want to be known as a "heavyweight" in the electronics/appliance industry, and the whole "zenith" thing just adds confusion... The name served it's purpose; distancing the public from their crappy reputation earned in the 80s as Gold Star. I remember those being the first VCRs for under $200, sold at membership-warehouse type places.

To say it disgusts me to see people buying fully-loaded Korean LG refrigerators for hundreds less then Whirlpool could even build them for in Benton Harbor, MI would be an understatement. And then our politicians bash Whirlpool for moving factories to Mexico!

BTW, you might find it interesting to know that Hyundai is sniffing around Ford Motor Company to buy the Jaguar name.

But Amen to LG dropping the Zenith name... Better off dead than whored-out!

I have seen a lot of LG products here in Australia & all I can say is they are utter crap compared to what they made 10 years ago when at least they worked after the warranty period expired.

These days it would be lucky if they work for 6 months before any work is done to them.

These high failure rates I would consider as unacceptable but it still persists & what would be the effects on the bottom line because of this.

Bulbs on the sign and cost to operate
 

Here's some useless trivia for you:

Perhaps some of you have wondered how much energy is used to illuminate this sign due to the flood bulbs on it. Here you go, I took a count and come up with roughly 609 flood bulbs per side (+/- 10 bulbs) that counts to 1218 total. Lets assume each flood is 150 watt, that means this sign would consume a total of 182700 watts, or 182.7 kW. ComEd charges $.09 per kilowatt hour (kWh). To operate this sign, not including the flourecent bulbs that light up the slogan, it would cost $16.44 per hour. I remember that sign being on all day long. So, for 24 hours it would cost $394.56 per day which counts to $11836.80 in a month of 30 days. Remember, this would be 2006 prices! energy cost in 1998 were about $.07/kWh when this sign was last on. So when the sign was last on, it was costing Zenith $12.79 per hour.

Interesting sign. Shame Zenith is no longer with us. The current set I watch is a 1982 Zenith we got in 1983 and even though it's 24 years old, it still remains in service as the main set. On the back, it says "Zenith Radio Corporation." I also have a 1970 Zenith I'd like to kick back to life that says the same thing on the back.

I think the great sign will go the way of the KFC rotating bucket, and the Union 76 ball... the junkyard.

I feel LG should let the Zenith name die with dignity. The Zenith of recent years is not the Zenith that made the sets in our collections. The sets are still out there and we can say what a great product Zenith was.

That's the "plus" of the new LG/Zenith stuff being junk... It will be gone in a few years, known only to landfills.

As to disappearing signs, I miss the Union 76 ball too. There was a "mint" condition Union 76 station (with service bays, ball sign and orange/blue tile) in Sun City, AZ until very recently. Looked like 1970, especially since somebody there must have specialized in older car service, and there were always big Chryslers, Buicks & Lincolns in front. Last time I went back, it went "independant" and the cool signs were gone. :sigh: :thumbsdn:

When you put it that way, at less than $13/hour that sign was a pretty cheap employee for the sales department!

Recently I attended an auction where they had a very large sign advertising General Motors Radio. This was from the thirties and was still new in the crate. (the building it was to have been installed on burned down while the sign was in transit) A big, beautiful sign that must have been 10' tall, the type shaped like an arrow pointing down to the storefront. Anyway, it was so big and bulky that nobody knew what to do with it. It sold for only $100. I would have bid on it but I sure don't have the space. I bet if you talked to the right person they would give you that monster Zenith sign but then what would you do with it!?

I tried to put these on my lawn before they were torn down, but the neighbors objected, so I had to get by with a picture. :D

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v6...r2/77-79ny.jpg

You don't really realize how big those signs are until you stand next to them. Still, if I had a few acres in the middle of nowhere with a polebarn for my cars, that Zenith sign would be pretty kickass! I could even get some use out of it for an antenna!

Me too. This is a good idea... Might generate some leads on old TVs too.

While personally, I would just as soon see the Zenith name phased out and Rest in Peace, from a business perspective I'm surprised that LG would phase it out, since if nothing else it provides the potential for market/line-specific branding. [Sort of like how Philips has kept the Magnavox and Sylvania brand names around, even though it seems like they've tried to phase them out on at least a few occasions] But, hey, that's just me. I'd be glad to see LG phase out the name anyway.

On a related note, while I agree that most of the LG Zenith-branded stuff I've seen has been mediocre or worse, I gotta say I'm fairly impressed with the Zenith-branded LG portable DVD player I bought a few weeks ago. Previous LG/Zenith portables I've seen in stores seemed pretty cheezy to me (even compared with many other low-cost models), which is why I was surprised that this one was such a winner. Decent, low-flicker LCD screen, controls have reasonable placement/feel, Even the build quality and appearance is decent enough, especially in its price range.

Yeah, that sort of thing annoys me too. Whirlpool is already closing Maytag's washer/dryer factory in Newton IA, but, sad to say, I can't blame Whirlpool for that.

OTOH, I bet lots of people were pretty upset when Ford was buying Jaguar...
[My parents figured Ford would probably start selling re-badged Ford Tauruses under the Jaguar name..!]

"KFC"..?? Remember when it was still perfectly acceptable to use the word "Fried" to describe fast-food? ...when it was "Kentucky Fried Chicken" and not "KFC"..? [similar to the rather sudden departure of the word "Sugar" from the names of children's breakfast cereals]

Speaking of gas stations, one brand I hated to see go was Amoco. I don't think many people around here had even heard of BP when they suddenly started tearing down the old Amoco and Standard signs and replacing them with BP signage. It just seemed weird to me. Besides, I kinda liked the old red-white-and-blue (and oftentimes oval-shaped) logos of the former Standard Oil Empire in their own little way. I even missed the SOHIO and Boron stations from their respective areas. Exxon, Mobil, and Chevron still bear their red-white-and-blue logos, but even the former two companies have merged.

As for consumer electronics names, it's kinda funny how even the Japanese companies don't even make many of their own products anymore-- or at least not in Japan. Ten or twenty years from now, perhaps we'll start reminicing about the products of those "old/former" Japanese companies like Sony or Hitachi or Matsushita or Akai or Victor/JVC or Toshiba or ...

woooow... 182.7 Kw :tears: One heck of a weenie roast. If the sign handled that much power it would melt!

I recall lamps used for signs, like the typical marquee above the old theater, used a 5 Watt 130 volt pyrex bulb rated at 5,000 hours. So, that would be 150/30=5, or 182.7/30 = 6KW, that's more like it. Bulbs strung in series pairs to run the sign at 220 volts. Approx 25 Amps to operate sign based on your bulb count...and a more reasonable wattage of bulb! :yes: . About 50 cents per hour to operate.

I know that sounds out of control, but if you check out the the sign in person, those are either 75 or 150 watt edison base flood lamps. that sign used to blare your eyes out when it was on at night.
We just had a job at the O'hare international airport and one of O'hares project managers told me that the Zenith sign was acutally used by pilots as an aid to know where they were durring landing because of the extreme brightness of the sign. I kind of laughed at that but the guy was dead serious and said that many of the pilots familiar with the sign took immediate note when it was shut off. (Northlake borders chicago right by the airport). Id like to get a pic of this sign while it is on. You only believe it when you can see it.

On a wing and a prayer...
 

I once dated a girl whose father was a Lutheran minister in New York (just over the Whitestone bridge from NYC.) His church had an illuminated cross on the highest part of the building. It was fairly bright; internally illuminated.

One night the cross lost power for some reason. Right away, her father got a call from the LaGuardia control tower telling him to get the thing back on fast! Same reason of course as the Zenith sign.

You know what would be REALLY neat, is if someone with a couple of acres and spendable cash, could make a "Sign Farm". All these iconic signs from happier times could be restored & preserved. An outdoor museum! And we could have a section for vintage roof antennae, and even put a pole-mounted air raid siren in there someplace.

Not impossible to do! Just takes money and a few people willing to help.

Charles

OMG...I don't want to think of the SDG&E power bill to run them! :yikes:

There is something like this in Las Vegas :

http://www.roadsidepeek.com/roadusa/...ign/neongrave/

It seems as though Ford IS selling re-branded Tauruses and Sables as Jag-u-ars, the X and S series. We call them "4D-U-R"s.
Kevin G.

Cool Charles. Here's another nifty link to the world's largset neon sign graveyard:

http://secretfunspot.blogspot.com/20...graveyard.html

The restaurant we ate at a few weeks ago had tables with old marine navigational maps under heavy varnish. Interesting to pick out the things that were noted for navigation aids. Lots of radio towers but also grain silos, smoke stacks, etc. Maybe someone can find a map of Chicago which includes the sign.

This is slightly off topic, but we just got a Zenith neon sign at the museum:

http://www.earlytelevision.org/zenith_neon.html

Anyone know anything about this? Is it reasonable that this is from the 60s?

One other thought to indicate the mid 50s... Notice the skinnier "z"? Not just in the horizontal tail of the Z which would be hard to reproduce in neon, but also in the vertical part? When did Zenith fatten up the "Z"?

But it is hard to believe they'd produce signs for sets that were never sold. :scratch2:

Could there be a date code on the transformer?

The time has finally come
 

Yes, it was only a matter of time until I saw the end of the Zenith sign off I-294. This past thursday they started to take the sign down. As of now, all of the wording on both sides of the sign have been removed. Soon the rest will come down.......Memories of those bright light bulbs to illuminate "Zenith" are all thats left. Good thing I got those photos last year.

Thanks for keeping us posted. Although it is of interest to all, the passing of the Zenith era holds special meaning to those of us who grew up in the Chicagoland area.

a Chrysler Air Raid Siren?
http://www.antiqueweekend.com/x/main.htm