The new, LED-ified ver­sion of the Citgo sign gets ded­i­cated Fri­day. It will look “exactly the same” as before. (Except it doesn’t: try shak­ing your head back and forth when you look at it from the bridge, and you’ll see a mind-boggling per­sis­tence of vision effect caused by the PWM.)

Citgo’s argu­ment that the LEDs con­sume less than half the power of the old neon is spe­cious. As stated, it’s true, but sim­ply upgrad­ing the ancient neon trans­form­ers to elec­tronic units might have accom­plished even greater energy sav­ings. White LEDs cur­rently aver­age 17-38 Lumens per Watt while white neon fetches more like 30-80 L/W (dis­re­gard­ing trans­former efficiency).

The bot­tom line is that, with these ren­o­va­tions, Boston has lost one of only two extant “neon spec­tac­u­lars” of the era. The remain­ing one is the Shell sign on Memo­r­ial Drive.