By admin 
Workers from Pacific Neon began removing W.F. Gormley & Sons’ neon sign on Tuesday morning from midtown, helping pave the way for the sign’s installation in Land Park next month.
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The longtime midtown funeral home announced in March it will move to Riverside Boulevard, the former location of the George L. Klumpp Chapel of Flowers. W.F. Gormley & Sons has operated in its current location on Capitol Avenue since 1925. The sign dates to 1931, according to W.F. Gormley & Sons co-owner Patrick Gormley Jr.
“A lot of people in the community were wondering what’s happening with the sign,” said Gormley, the fifth generation of his family to work in the business. “It is very exciting and proud that we are able to continue this at the new location.”
The logistics of move to Land Park
Pacific Neon installation technicians Steven Dyer and Hank Uroff started work on moving the sign at about 7 a.m. Tuesday.
The plan was to take the sign down and transport it to a Pacific Neon location on Marconi Avenue, where it will receive minor touch-ups ahead of its move to Land Park. Uroff, who comes from a family of people who work on neon, said he intended to avoid freeways, taking 16th Street and Del Paso Boulevard.
“We strap it all down good, but I’d still rather go slow just to be safe,” Uroff said.
Before long, Uroff and Dyer were in a lift, unscrewing parts of the sign and disconnecting a cable leading across the parking lot to the main building of W.F. Gormley & Sons.
Pacific Neon sales representative Ryan Drury, whose family has owned his business since 1958, arrived shortly after 7 a.m. He explained that the removal process from midtown by his crew would likely take up to six hours and that the W.F. Gormley & Sons sign wouldn’t need major restoration work.
“We’re going to clean it up, put new Lexan covers, make sure all the illumination is in good shape, replace some transformers to make sure it’s essentially as vibrant and serviced as possible and then take it back for installation,” Drury said.
Onlookers on Tuesday morning included Francisco Chavira, a commercial photographer who has become interested in taking pictures of neon signs.
“Any neon sign in Sacramento that I see getting worked on or slowly going into disrepair, I get this odd anxiousness that it’s going to get disappeared,” Chavira said. “So I’m glad that Pacific Neon’s around to come take care of it.”
The sign will not be missing from the local landscape for long. Gormley said he hopes the sign will be installed before his business opens its new Land Park location around late September or early October. It continues to hold funerals at its midtown location.
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“We are going to be having an open house for the community and members of the area to come and see the new location” Gormley said.
Historic recognition for neon signs
Sean de Courcy, the city’s preservation director, said the W.F. Gormley & Sons sign is in the early stages of being added to the local historic register.
It would be the first sign added purely to the register that isn’t part of a building’s listing, such as the “Dancing Kids sign” associated with Tower Theatre in Land Park. That sign, which is associated with Tower Records, was relocated without city permission from its perch above Tower Cafe to an office for the Tower District. The city later approved installing a replica sign outside.
Aside from the Tower Records sign, de Courcy also noted the city-approved relocation of the Hollywood Hardware sign to the R Street corridor and the moving of the Mercury Cleaners sign.
“The ultimate goal is to create a document that gives that provides guidance for the treatment and preservation of historic signs,” de Courcy said. “We’re working on that now. But we already have the framework in our code to list these elements as historic objects.”
Sacramento Preservation Commissioner Ella Cross evaluated the W.F. Gormley & Sons sign and discovered that it could be listed on the local register, de Courcy said.
Gormley declined to provide the cost for moving or working on the sign, merely saying his family and Drury’s “have been friends forever, and it’s a way to support another Sacramento business.”
But de Courcy praised the Gormley family’s commitment to saving the sign.
“I think the fact that they’re investing so much in the sign’s relocation, and preservation already speaks to the fact that they see value in it and want to see it preserved,” de Courcy said.
Gormley’s father Patrick Gormley, 70, said that the sign had been around for as long as he could remember.
“We’ve been rooted in Sacramento forever,” he said. “We started in business in 1897, and it’s nice that this is still going to travel with us over there as we have a new chapter, a new beginning on Riverside.”
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This story was originally published August 18, 2026 at 11:30 AM.