30 Rock owners get OK to remove neon from famous NBC marquee

The owners of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, the historic home of NBC and NBC News, have been given the go-ahead to replace more of the building’s iconic neon marquee lettering with an LED installation.

Real estate company Tishman Speyer had filed paperwork with the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission seeking permission to change out the light sources and make changes to the verbiage on the 49th Street marquee of the building.

The commission voted 7-1 to allow the changes in December 2024, which are expected to take place sometime in 2025.

In addition to removing the neon tubing, the blue words reading “Observation Deck” on the sides will be swapped out in favor of signage reading “Top of the Rock,” the branding Tishman Speyer uses for the tourist attraction on the 70th floor.

Tishman Speyer will also add the words “30 Rockefeller Plaza” in red to the lower front of the banded marquee with “Observation Deck” remaining on the upper front portion of the marquee, according to renderings submitted to the city.

In this photo, submitted as part of the building approval process to the City of New York, a worker holds up an ‘N’ built from LED next to the current neon letters to showcase the difference.

With the exception of the side “Observation Deck” lettering, the core structure of the marquee, which is almost 90 years old, is expected to remain intact, with custom-made tubing illuminated using LED technology being installed in favor of the traditional glass tubes filled with neon gas.

The change is being touted as part of ongoing efforts to make the building more environmentally-friendly. Neon lighting has significantly higher power requirements and uses more electricity to stay lit than LED (the letters are typically illuminated 24 hours a day). It also tends to have difficulty remaining illuminated during wet or rainy weather, a shortcoming LED should resolve.

Advertisement

What will be lost, however, is some level of illumination; the LED lettering will not be as bright as the neon. 

The move is also yet another nail in the coffin on the use of true neon lighting in New York City. The glass-and-gas powered lighting technique for signage was once found all over the city — including Times Square. Much of that signage has been replaced with LED masquerading as neon tubes or, in many cases, ripped out entirely in favor of giant seamless LED billboards much like the video walls found in television studios.

Purists say that LED can’t replicate the brightness and subtle glowing movement found in neon tube signage, which is accomplished by electrifying gas inside of a sealed glass tube.

NBC owns most of the space it occupies on floors 2 through 30 inside the building in an office condominium-style arrangement that calls for Tishman Speyer to own the building itself as well as the interior spaces not held by the network.

Back in 2014, Comcast successfully petitioned the preservation committee to remove the large “GE” letters atop 30 Rock and replace it with the word “Comcast” and the NBC peacock, which had been part of the parent company’s logo since 2013, when Comcast acquire the remaining portion of NBC from GE.

In addition, the marquee lighting on the 6th Avenue side of the building has already been converted to LED. That conversion coincided with adding references to “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” on the marquee. Comcast also owns the naming rights to the building despite it carrying the colloquial name “30 Rock” and alternatively referred to as the “GE Building” or “NBC Building.”

Around 2013, several of the building’s stone panels that previously sported only the NBC logo were swapped out in favor of the Comcast logo with the peacock sitting atop.