When Marty Jourard moved to Los Angeles in 1978 to become a musician, he left the Florida Motel behind, but he took the name with him.
He joined the band The Motels, a nod to his memories of Gainesville when he passed the Southwest 13th Street sign every morning before school.
“It was sort of, like, burned into my visual memory as something that was always there,” Jourard said.
Forty-two years after he left, the legacy of the retro sign finally came to an end.
On Wednesday morning, the iconic Florida Motel sign was dismantled and taken to a warehouse owned by the city of Gainesville, said Danny Powell, the owner of Signstar, a company specializing in signs. The sign will be restored and possibly displayed again.
The sign was removed in sections over the course of six hours with the help of a five-person crew, Powell said. A crane hoisted it out of the way and onto the trailers. Workers had to be careful removing the sign due to the rust.
The Florida Motel was demolished about two weeks prior to the sign to make way for a Comfort Suites Hotel. At that time, questions about the future of the sign circulated. Florida Motel commercial broker and realtor Chip Patel raised $970 out of the $2,500 he needed for the sign to be donated to the city as of Thursday.
News of the sign reached Tampa, where Signstar is located, and Powell reached out to help.
“It’s not just unique to Gainesville, but to the state and the country,” Powell said.
Money raised from the GoFundMe page will go toward restoring the sign to its original aesthetic from the 1950s, said Wendy Thomas, the director of the city of Gainesville’s Department of Doing.
“I think it will be missed, but I think a great part of this story is that it was not demolished,” Thomas said.
It will take a lot of care and six months of restoration before the public can see it again, Powell said.
“A lot of these signs, people have grown up seeing them every day,” Powell said. “I just enjoy being a part of something to restore that.”
Growing up in Gainesville, Jourard said the Florida Motel sign reminded him of home.
He last saw it a year ago when he came back to Gainesville to visit his mother. He was disappointed to hear of the icon’s demise but understood that nothing lasts forever.
“What’s really pleased me (is) that against all odds, somebody thought that it was worth saving that sign,” Jourard said.
Contact Dana Cassidy at dcassidy@alligator.org and follow her on Twitter at @danacassidy_
Construction workers dismantle the iconic Florida Motel sign on Southwest 13th Street Wednesday afternoon. It took six hours and a five-person crew.
