Heinz Insurance (Owatonna, MN) – I recently got an email from a friend of mine named Dave Correll, a sign painter and the owner of Brushwork Signs in Faribault, MN. He was writing to tell me about a vintage neon sign in nearby Owatonna that he had been commissioned to renovate. As the story goes, Heinz Insurance (in business since 1941) just had the front of their building restored and wanted to extend the facelift to their signage. Although the sign came down briefly during the building restoration, it had to quickly be put back up since it’d been grandfathered in to the new city codes that now prevent such signs. While it was down, the owner decided to take out all of the neon tubing since it no longer worked. Aside from that, the sign itself was still in good shape, but the owner of the insurance agency wanted in updated to reflect how the business had evolved… specifically removing the names of the previous owners who hadn’t worked there in some time (Vern and Dennis). This email inspired me to dig up the photo you see here, which I shot in 2011 when the neon was still intact. Make sure to check out Dave’s process shots to see the various stages of its 2013 renovation and compare the before and after.
LOCATION:
- Neon Signs
- Vintage Signs
