Located within the Neon Museum is a large collection of vintage neon signs, known as the 'boneyard.' The tallest among the signs is a Hard Rock Café guitar sign. There's a placard underneath the sign that highlights it and reads:
The Las Vegas Hard Rock Café Guitar Sign
Neon guitar signs became the symbol world-wide for the Hard Rock Café brand. This Las Vegas guitar sign is important because it was the flagship -- the first Hard Rock Café guitar sign in the world. It graced the corner of Paradise Road and Harmon Avenue from 1990 - 2017 and was featured in Hollywood films like "Homey I Blew Up the Kid" and National Lampoon's "Vegas Vacation".
The restoration project involved at estimated 1,650 man hours which included rebuilding the sign in six sections: four body sections, on neck section and one head section. The letter spelling "Hard Rock Café" consist of 1,538 10-watt clear incandescent light bulbs. Approximately 4,110 feet - more than three quarters of a mile - of neon tubing glows on the sign with more than 700 individual neon units. Neon colors used in the sign are Ruby Red, Clear Red, 3500K White and Yellow Gold II. The sign majestically stands more than 80-feet tall with a 24-foot girth.
YESCO donated the guitar sign to the Neon Museum in 2017. On November 27, 2017, the Museum launched a crowdfunding campaign to restore the sign, install it in the Neon Boneyard and establish an endowment for its ongoing maintenance. The campaign quickly gained global attention with generous individuals and businesses contributing from 13 countries around the world including Australia, Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom and the United States. In the United States, donors contributed from 42 state and U.S. territories including Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Iowa, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Mississippi, North Carolina, North Dakota, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, Nevada, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin and Wyoming.
The switch was flipped to officially light the restored Las Vegas Hard Rock Café guitar sign on March 4, 2019 during a celebration honoring the donors whose generosity made this restoration possible.