When Pepsi-Cola erected its big red neon sign in Long Island City, along the Queens side of the East River, in 1936, ships would steam up to the plant below it and unload sacks of sugar from Havana. Soda hasn't been bottled there for years and the plant was torn down in 2004 to make way for a high-rise apartment complex. So the sign--unofficial landmark and longtime beacon to local residents, film location scouts, and drunken taxicab passengers on the F.D.R. Drive--had to move, migrating letter by letter, from the plant's roof to a site on the ground, three hundred feet to the south.
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