At Neon Shop Fishtail, Owner Tom Brickler Keeps Chicago Aglow

CHICAGO (CBS) -- Neon is aglow in the city – in fact, one neon artist has been lighting up Chicago with his neon lights for nearly four decades.

CBS 2 Photojournalist Tamott Wolverton headed to Neon Shop Fishtail at 2247 N. Western Ave. to see just how neon lights are created – and to tour the museum of eye candy.

According to the shop's website, Tom Brickler opened the Neon Shop in Uptown in 1986 – starting with an old, broken neon Budweiser sign that he knew was worth fixing.

"You can be pretty fancy with signs, but sometimes I want to be kind of an average Joe when I'm talking about the sign," Brickler said. "There's something about the glow and the color of the tubes, and the fact that it was high-voltage electricity and I couldn't touch it, made me curious about it."

Brickler went on to name his business after a fishtail ribbon burner "used for making sweeping curved bends with glass over fire," the shop website said. He wrote that he later added the Neon Shop name to make the business easier to find – given that people were calling him asking about lobster prices when he was using just the fishtail name.

Brickler said the art of neon light creation is "a minute-to-learn and a lifetime-to-master type thing."

Neon remains in high demand in Chicago, and people are still innovating with it, Brickler said. He said his shop has been creating a lot of phrases in neon lately, such as, "Better together," and "Good vibes only."

"With COVID, so many people right now are decking out their homes or man caves or woman caves," he said. "Five people can come into this store, and I'll have one person looking at modern, contemporary, cutting-edge phrase neon. I'll have another person looking at automotive neon for their garage art, and another person looking at sports neon for all the Chicago sports and other teams that we make in neon."

He called neon "a glowing piece of art that inspires you."

"There's no light that glows like neon," Brickler said.

Brickler is still sometimes at his shop seven days a week. He said he got into neon because he has loved it his whole life.

"It's a lot of fun sometimes driving around Chicago at night and pointing to a bunch of them and saying, 'You know, we did that one, we did that one, we did that one,'" he said.

Neon Shop Fishtail can be reached at (773) 227-0303. You can find their website here.