Checking In With The Rainbow Cafe

It's been a year since I'll looked in on the old Rainbow Cafe in Sunset Park, the beautiful old restaurant and catering hall that closed down in 2008 and was then sold two years later, and stripped of its iconic neon sign. (Paul Signs, which removed it, pledged last year to restore the sign, rather than junk it.) It remains boarded up, with no sign a new tenant on the horizon. However, the building has been obviously spruced up a bit. It's bright and spic and span. Brownstoner reported a year ago that the space would become a store, but they're certainly taking a long time about it.

The Neon We've Lost

The way the City is run under Herr Bloomberg, we've gotten used to old, timeless, irreplaceable mom-and-pop businesses disappeared at a rapid rate.

Lately however, the City has suffered a string of lost businesses that take their glorious neon with them, leaving the burg all the more visually bereft. Hinsch's, the Bay Ridge soda fountain, was only the latest. It had one of the greatest, and oldest, neon signs in the town (photos courtesy of Project Neon). Here are a few more.

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Iconic Rainbow Cafe Signs Taken Down

The beautifully signed Rainbow Cafe in Sunset Park closed up shop in 2008, and then was sold in 2010. All this while, we wondered what would become of the former restaurant's splendiferous, old-school, neon signage.

Today, a read wrote in to say, "All the signs were removed today by Paul Signs Inc. Brooklyn NY. They were still intact and not damaged when they took them away."

Where are they going? Will they be preserved? Who's moving in? So many questions.