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Originally Posted by drh4683
That Zenith sign you see once lit up at night and was the coolest and brightest sign you could immagine. It was not neon, it is composed of all flood lights, basic edison base bulbs that just simply screw in. There must be hundreds of them and the perimeter of the sign was flood lights too. The sign still stands today but has not lit up since 1998 or so.
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Why is this sign no longer illuminated at night, and for that matter, how long has it been standing? My best guess (this is only a guess) as to why the lights aren't used now is that it is now much too expensive to operate the hundreds of floodlights, etc. of which it is made. The only other reason I can think of is the wiring, sockets, etc. are now so old (and it would be too expensive to repair) that it isn't safe to operate the lighting any longer.
BTW, as I write this I am listening to the Internet stream of radio station WRLL, Berwyn, Illinois, "Real Oldies" 1690. I like oldies, but the only oldies station on AM in greater Cleveland went to a news-talk format last year, and the only other so-called "oldies" station on FM in Cleveland plays only '60s-'70s records during the week. It has a program it calls "Jukebox Sunday Night" which is mostly '50s oldies, but unfortunately this program is broadcast only on Sunday evenings. I can't for the life of me imagine why the FM "oldies" station didn't pick up the AM's oldies format (which was modeled after the Top-40 format of CKLW radio in Windsor/Detroit in the '60s-'70s) when the latter dropped it. I guess the owners of the former oldies station in Willoughby, Ohio (east suburban Cleveland) figured they could make more money with their station carrying mostly satellite syndicated talk programming than to continue their live local oldies format (the latter was on the station for over a year). The AM station could have picked up a satellite feed of an oldies network, such as one of ABC's "Pure" satellite networks, if the station were the least bit interested in continuing as an oldies broadcaster. The programming wouldn't have been live/local anymore, but at least the station's image as an oldies station could have been preserved. Now the AM radio dial in greater Cleveland and northeastern Ohio is nothing but talk (and Radio Disney on 1260, plus a standards station in Akron, Ohio on 1590), but this is probably the case everywhere in America these days. A local station 20 miles south of here went silent last year after its latest format (Sporting News Radio sports talk) failed to generate the listener base the station's owner had hoped it would. Another problem that station had was that it was daytime only on 1560 and could not get authorization to operate low power at night (or the station could have gone to an exclusive Internet radio format as an oldies station, etc.), but that's another story.