Today Tampa’s Crab Devil collective released a video was released showing members taking on the arduous process of preserving Fun-Lan Drive-In and Swap Shop’s historic entrance sign.
In just over four minutes, the video—directed and edited by local filmmaker and Creative Loafing Tampa Bay contributor Michael M Sinclair—documents the process of saving the sign. Getting the sign to come apart and move safely was easier said than done.
When CL broke the news about Fun-Lan closing and Crab Devil arrived to save the sign, Dave Kibby of the collective said that he had never seen anything like the task at hand. Several other workers—including the late Owen Meats—were trying to figure out how to best take apart and move the sign to Crab Devil’s location at 3800 N Nebraska Ave.
In the video, Kibby says that the sign was, “put together with 1940s technology,” and that the old material made the process extra burdensome to take it apart carefully, “without having to cut it up.”
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On Facebook, Sinclair shared the video and announced that Crab Devil had approached him to document their efforts.
“It took many hours of hard work for the Crab Devil crew to take it down bit by bit,” Sinclair wrote. “I was there for a couple hours each day to capture the process.”
Future plans for the sign may include propping it up high on a shipping container above Crab Devil’s “Peninsularium” Ybor Heights immersive art attraction so it can be seen from Nebraska Avenue, highlighting the project’s goal of being, “Cooler than a museum, smarter than a theme park, weirder than a carnival.”
Sinclair will also be documenting future developments at the Peninsularium.
The body of the sign was in place since the beginning of Fun-Lan and is 71-years-old, Fun-Lan manager Jerry Corgnati told CL. Since then, there have been some additions like neon lighting and the digital sign that projected Fun-Lan’s farewell message, “Merry Christmas & Happy New Year we will miss you…”
Corgnati told CL contributor Kelly Benjamin—who helped arrange the preservation of the sign—that Crab Devil should take it for free in order to avoid its destruction.
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This article appears in Dec 30, 2021 – Jan 5, 2022.
