SAN JOSE (KCBS Radio) -- The building whose products it advertised was demolished a dozen years ago, but San Jose's neon dancing pig sign will live on.
Funded by $35,000 in donations, a restoration effort will preserve the Stephen's Meat Products sign on Montgomery Street.
Preservation activist Brian Grayson called the sign "an icon". "It speaks to a time and a period when that sign and neon itself was in its prime," said Grayson.
Stephen's Meat Products was founded during the Depression. The Montgomery Street building went up in 1948 and the sign, with its eye-catching animated neon pig, arrived in the 1950's.
The sausage-making operation on Montgomery Street shut down years ago and the building was razed in 2007. The site is now a parking lot, perhaps the only one in America that will be marked by a sign bearing dancing neon pigs.
