When Todd Matuszewicz learned to bend tubes of glass to be filled with neon gas, he felt like he was doing tai chi. He was a craftsman, relaxed in the flow of his work. “You’re in fires and you’re standing up and you’re making little, tiny movements and adjustments all day long,” Matuszewicz said. “It’s so beautiful.”
To Matuszewicz, each neon sign—made by him or someone else—illuminated a small part of a city and anchored our memories of that place. Signs, like the neon chef with a mid-pancake flip on the facade of Pete’s Kitchen on East Colfax Avenue, make our communities feel like they’re ours.
Now, Matuszewicz is transitioning from creator to defender. Thanks to his participation in CU Denver’s Change Makers program and the master’s degree he’s earning from the Dana Crawford Preservation Program at CU Denver this fall, Matuszewicz is making progress toward his goal of cataloging and protecting Colorado’s many historic neon signs. “The amount of support I’ve got, and the avenues that that support has come from, is just unattainable without the university,” Matuszewicz said.
Making Changes
Matuszewicz can’t explain what initially drew him to working with neon. He’d heard, by chance, that the son of one of his wife’s acquaintances was going to neon school. “And I said, ‘I’m going to neon school.’ I had never thought about it once,” he said. “Just—bam.” He then worked at a neon workshop for years and eventually shifted to become a Waldorf school teacher.
After 16 years, he burned out and found his way back to the neon shop but, this time, something felt different. “I love neon a lot, but it wasn’t fulfilling in the way that I had hoped,” Matuszewicz said. He tried exploring his interest in chemistry by earning a degree in it from Metropolitan State University of Denver but wasn’t able to land a job. “I didn’t know what to do,” he said.
His wife had heard about the Change Makers program at CU Denver and suggested he try it. “It’s basically a symposium class,” Matuszewicz said. Adults completing or nearing the end of their primary careers spend a semester exploring what they might do next through a structured curriculum, group discussions, and guest speaker presentations. They can also audit courses at CU Denver for free. The point of it all is to help community members discover how they’d like to spend their time after completing their primary careers—or as Matuszewicz likes to say, find their “encore careers.”
It was in the Change Makers program discussions that Matuszewicz discovered he had a passion that others wanted to rally around: For years, he’d been noticing that many of Denver’s neon signs had fallen into disrepair—or worse, have been knocked down. “I’d love to save the neon signs of Colorado,” he told the group. One of his peers knew a historian of Los Angeles’ neon signs and connected them for a phone call. “And it was just like this, like one person after another,” Matuszewicz said. He began getting connected with people who could help him. “That’s the strength of the network of the cohort,” he said.
Matuszewicz’s wife saw how driven he was becoming, and how much traction he was getting as he began to network with other people who loved neon signs as much as him. So, she encouraged him to apply for CU Denver’s master of science in historic preservation program in the College of Architecture and Planning (CAP). The first day of classes was on his 60th birthday. “I said, ‘I gave myself a master’s program.’”
Finding His Why of Work
In the master’s program, Matuszewicz discovered that he felt strongly about preserving a lot more than just neon signs. In Introduction to Historic Preservation, instructor Kathleen Corbett taught students how to nominate buildings to the National Register of Historic Properties. Matuszewicz submitted an amendment for the listing of the Central Presbyterian Church in Denver to recognize the Chinese school that was housed there. It was successfully added to the National Register. “The preservation community is really amazing,” Matuszewicz said. “They’re writing nominations for all kinds of underrepresented communities. And I go, ‘This is a why of work.’ Not many people get a why of work, but I’m there because I agree with their why.”
The hands-on experience in the classroom translated directly to a work opportunity. Now, Matuszewicz writes nominations part-time for the State Register of Historic Places for History Colorado. His focus area is preserving landmarks from Colorado’s LGBTQ+ community.
And though he expanded beyond his devotion to neon, he never abandoned it. In Matuszewicz’s first year in the program, instructors Chris Geddes and Abbey Christman helped him find a summer internship at the Aurora History Museum, during which he cataloged every neon sign on East Colfax Avenue in Aurora. Then, faculty connections helped him land an internship at Colorado Preservation, Inc. doing the same for Colfax in Denver. Meanwhile, Matuszewicz picked up some more part-time work with Historic Denver’s Discover Denver project, an ambitious attempt to document all of Denver’s more than 160,000 structures.
All Roads Lead Back to Neon
Matuszewicz applied for the prestigious national Harrison Goodall Preservation Fellowship to continue his work cataloging and pursuing protection for Colorado’s neon signs. He was rejected. Rather than wallowing, he told CAP staff member Sarah Marsom what happened, and she suggested he request feedback on his application and try again. Her advice worked. He submitted a second application for an entirely new project: an AI model that can rapidly identify historical features on buildings. If successful, it would significantly speed up a Discover Denver project, a building survey. This time, he was awarded the fellowship.
Matuszewicz has a secret mission for the work: Once the model can successfully recognize building features, he said, it can be retrained to recognize the features of neon signs. “Then, people around the country could just go photograph neon signs, show the picture to the model, and then the model will actually do all of the descriptive work to make a record of that sign so that we can then document neon signs really quickly,” he said.
In the meantime, he’s leveraging the skills he learned in Corbett’s class and the experience he’s gained at History Colorado to submit his first request to add a neon art piece to the State Registry of Historic Properties. The work he hopes to protect is a public art installation created by renowned neon artist Stephen Antonakos, a rust-colored right angle that towers high above Lawrence Street in downtown Denver, titled “Incomplete Square.” The piece is easily visible from the CAP classrooms in the CU Denver Building, where Matuszewicz once gave a presentation on neon as a historic material. “I said, ‘And there’s this famous piece, does anybody know it?’ And nobody did. And I opened the shade and I said, ‘It’s right there,’” he said.
The piece is attached to the east-facing wall of The Residences at Lawrence Street Center, the private residential building adjacent to CU Denver’s Lawrence Street Center. For now, you won’t see it illuminated due to a lack of proper maintenance—but Matuszewicz hopes to change that. He’s applying for grant funds to get the sign restored to working order.
If his bid before the State Historic Review Commission is successful, “Incomplete Square” will be the first neon work in Denver to be recognized separately from a building (the other recognized neon sign in the Mile High City is the sign atop the Jonas Brothers Fur building on Broadway). “My whole goal is, if I can get one, then I can start picking off the other ones,” Matuszewicz said.
His sights are set on Colfax. “Some of the signs we so love, like Pete’s Kitchen or the Riviera Motel, those signs have been around for 70 years,” Matuszewicz said. “People have these attachments to them that aren’t about the business.” For Matuszewicz, neon signs bring us back to the places we spend time in at different moments of our lives. “And so, when we restore and save those neon signs, we save a part of our history,” he said.
Three years after enrolling in the Change Makers program in search of something to do, Matuszewicz is sure about his new path in the world of preservation—and busier than ever. “How would that have been without Change Makers? It just wouldn’t have happened,” Matuszewicz said. “And the historic preservation program, I just got a ton of support.
