The retro neon sign that marked the Grant-Stone Shopping Center for more than a half-century was torn down Wednesday — but efforts to save it may have been gaining traction by day’s end.
Two smaller “city sign-code compliant signs” — for Family Dollar and the Grant Stone Market — will replace the old sign, said Bruce Ash, president and CEO of Paul Ash Management.
“Unfortunately, ‘progress’ has a cost. In this case a very nostalgic sign from an earlier era in Tucson’s history,” Ash wrote in an email. “The city wanted us to upgrade (the sign) to our current codes. We did not get a choice if we wanted to accommodate our major tenants.”
Also, he said, the sign was going to come down sooner or later due to work the Regional Transportation Authority is doing at that corner, the northwest corner of East Grant Road and North Stone Avenue.
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Believed to date to the 1950s, the sign is “definitely an oldie and very goodie from that period,” Ash said.
Later Wednesday, Dirk J. Arnold, an artist who works at preserving historic signs, said he and a group of about a dozen preservationists will work on saving the Grant-Stone sign. “The sign did not go straight to the scrapyard. It is at the yard of a local sign company,” Arnold said.
When Arnold first learned about the sign coming down Wednesday morning through social media, “it threw me into a blind panic,” and telephone calls were made to champion restoring the sign, he said.
Arnold, who was a member of the city’s historic landmark sign-code committee, said the Grant-Stone sign “can be restored and put up elsewhere. ... This sign would fit that because of its age and uniqueness — the old neon, materials and style.”
Reached with that news, Ash said he hadn’t heard that anyone wanted to save the sign, but added, “As an advocate for a Tucson of yesteryear, as a lifelong Tucsonan, I would love to be able to do it if there’s a way.”
Ash said Addisigns Co.’s contract for removing the sign included a price predicated on salvaging and recycling the steel. But “I’m happy to make that phone call tomorrow” to the sign company to see if there’s a way to save the sign’s face, he said.