‘Up’-ended

• A 1940s landmark Hollywood District soda sign goes the way of all fizz

By Eric Bartels

The Portland Tribune, Jun 24, 2003, Updated Oct 30, 2009

The malty aroma of the brewery doesn’t ride the breeze around downtown Portland anymore. Not since the Blitz-Weinhard Brewing Co. moved away. Nor do baseballs ricochet wildly off the swimsuited Jantzen girl at Beaver games. They took her off the left-field wall.

And yet another winsome piece of the city’s commercial history will vanish in coming weeks when the vintage 7 Up sign high above the Hollywood neighborhood in Northeast Portland blinks off for the last time. The bold neon beacon, garish in the style of its time, will be replaced by a Budweiser sign.

“When I was first out of college, I came out here from back East,” said Mildred Donahue, a member of the Hollywood Boosters, the local neighborhood association. “I know it was there then. I know it was there in the ’40s.

“It’s kind of a landmark out here,” she said.

A group known as 3701 Investors LLC reached a final agreement last week with Anheuser-Busch Inc. to replace the sign with a red neon “B” for Budweiser. Brian Kelley, one of the investors, said the changeover should take place within 45 days.

The sign had no official historic designation.

“We checked with the city,” Kelley said. “The sign can be redesigned as long as it’s within the confines of the original sign. They’re not really bringing the sign down, they’re rebuilding it.”

“That 7 Up has been up there for many, many years,” said Bob Gruber, president of Portland’s Multi-Light Sign Co., which has contracted to do the work. “I hate to see old signs disappear. It’s kind of a landmark. It leaves you a sense of nostalgia. Once they’re gone, you can’t do anything.”

The 7 Up sign is thought to date from the mid- to late 1940s, when the soft drink it advertises was bottled in the building beneath it. The space previously had housed a paint store and a dairy, at which point the cylindrical facade of the building formed a huge milk bottle. Gruber said the sign most likely was built by Epcon, a prominent sign company that went out of business decades ago.

“That’s got a scintillating chaser on it,” Gruber said, referring to a special effects mechanism in the sign’s electrical works. “You don’t see that very often on signs around town anymore. I hate to see it go away.”

The sign once featured bubbles rising in sequence and the product slogan “You like it, it likes you” on alternating panels. In recent years, it consisted simply of stationary elements.

“They’ve refurbished that sign several times,” Gruber said. “They either removed some of the copy or painted it out.”

Born in the Midwest

Like Anheuser-Busch, the maker of Budweiser, 7 Up hails from St. Louis, Mo. Invented in 1929 by chemical engineer Charles Leiper Grigg, it was originally called Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda. Its popularity crested in the 1970s, when it sold itself as an alternative to cola beverages, but since has waned.

It is now the third-most popular noncola in the country behind Mountain Dew and Sprite.

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