La Concha Motel lobby

Most of what the Neon Museum keeps is flat: signs, letters, arrows. Its entrance is a building. The La Concha Motel opened on the Strip in 1961, built by M.K. Doumani, and its lobby was a small, startling thing: a concrete shell of swooping, scalloped arches that looks more like a seashell, or a piece of folded paper, than a motel office.

The architect was Paul Revere Williams of Los Angeles, the first African American member of the American Institute of Architects, best known for houses for Hollywood clients and for public buildings across Southern California. The lobby is one of the best-preserved examples of the space-age roadside style often called Googie.

Motels on the Strip in the 1950s and 1960s faced the same problem as the casinos: they had to stand out to drivers on a fast road. Some did it with signs; the La Concha did it with its office. The thin concrete shell was both building and advertisement, and it stood near the Riviera, in the heart of the old Strip, for more than four decades while larger resorts grew up around it.

The motel stood at 2955 Las Vegas Boulevard South, and closed in 2004. With the site headed for redevelopment, the Doumani family donated the lobby to the Neon Museum. In 2006 it was cut into sections, trucked north along Las Vegas Boulevard and reassembled on the museum's lot, at a cost of roughly $600,000 raised from donors. Restoration followed, and the lobby opened as the museum's visitor center when the museum opened to the general public in October 2012.

The swap was neat: the building now introduces a collection of signs from the very era that produced it. Inside are the ticket desk and a small shop; tours start from here. Few visitors realize they are standing in a building that was once a working motel office on the Strip, and that it was moved, piece by piece, about three and a half miles to get here.

The museum's relocation plans, announced in 2024, have included moving the lobby again, so check neonmuseum.org for the current state of things.