There is little trace left of the neon Coachman’s sign on the Salt Lake City corner where it had stood for half a century.

As traffic rumbled and beeped nearby on 1300 South and State Street, a handful of people gathered to watch the remaining portion of the now-demolished restaurant’s sign come down Tuesday morning.

The sign will be transported to an empty warehouse in the Granary District, where it will be stored until the Liberty Wells Community Council can have it restored and find it a new home.

As a small crowd watched from the sidewalk, onlookers reflected on their memories of the longtime restaurant and shared their hopes for the sign’s future.

“As long as it’s preserved and maintained, we would just be happy to see it go anywhere in Salt Lake, as a gift back to the city because we know it’s important to all of our community members,” said Margaret Coppin, chair of the Liberty Wells Community Council.

Attending the watch party was Barry Holmstead, who, with his wife, Gloria Holmstead, serves on the Liberty Wells Community Council and lives in the Liberty Wells neighborhood. Coachman’s was within the neighborhood’s boundaries.

Holmstead said he remembers going to Coachman’s with his grandparents and his mom when it was in its original location, at about 3300 South and State Street, in the 1960s, when he was 5 years old.

“We’d go down State Street and get breakfast at Coachman’s,” Holmstead said. “We used to have Postum. We thought we were pretty hot stuff.”

Lisa Michele Church, a retired lawyer who works to save vintage signs and has written two books about such relics in Utah, said that in the 1960s and ’70s, Coachman’s “was the place to go for wedding breakfasts, for the Chamber of Commerce meetings, for the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association luncheons."

“People had their company Christmas parties here, so it was very important to the community,” she continued.

Coachman’s opened in 1959. The restaurant moved to the corner of 1300 South and State Street in the 1970s and stayed there until it closed in 2021. Its iconic sign was installed in the mid-70s.

Once she heard that the famous diner was being demolished at the end of May, Coppin spearheaded an effort to save the sign.

The council raised $15,000 to pay YESCO, the company that originally built the sign, to painstakingly lower it piece by piece, then put it in storage in the Granary District.

On Monday, the top part of the sign — the white ribbon that says “Coachmans” — had been taken down, as well as the main part of the large lantern.

What remained Tuesday was the biggest part of the sign, the brown section that reads, “Dinner & Pancake House,” and the bottom part of the lantern.

Although the sign’s final home is still a question mark, members of the group that came together Tuesday had hopes for where it would end up and how it would be used.

Preservation Utah’s Patrick Becker, who moved to Utah from Las Vegas and volunteered at the Neon Museum, said he’d love to see a “little Salt Lake boneyard of signs.”

“I’d love to see [the Coachman’s sign] stay in Liberty Wells, but my hope is that anywhere within the city we can find space for it, and potentially others as well. That’d be really fun,” Becker said.

Brandy Strand, the executive director of Preservation Utah, said, “What I really hope comes of it is it becomes its own monumental icon.”

“How cool would it be if we found all these neon signs and we started to create a walk through downtown where we started to put neon signs in front of historic buildings, and it became a walking spot,” Strand said.

After YESCO workers strapped the Coachman’s sign into a harness hooked to a crane, they used blow torches to cut through the metal poles holding it up. Then they lifted the sign into the air and brought it down to earth, next to the “Coachmans” ribbon, which was loaded on a trailer. A few of the onlookers clapped as the sign landed safely.

Whatever happens to the Coachman’s sign in the end, the busy intersection at 1300 South and State Street has lost what many call a “landmark.”

“It’s going to forever change this corner,” Becker said. “It’s going to be completely different without that sign here.”