Golden lamp returns to top of Lamp Theatre marquee

The lamp above The Lamp Theatre marquee in downtown Irwin was returned to its rightful place Saturday morning after a lengthy refurbishing.

“It was all coming apart. The finish was coming off of it,” said Mike Brady, an Irwin public works employee who took on the task of giving new life to the downtown landmark.

He reapplied gold-colored concrete stucco and gave it a finishing coat of polyurethane to protect the stucco, which amounted to about 125 pounds. The lamp weighs about 300 pounds, Brady estimated, which created some challenges in moving it.

Brady worked on the iconic lamp at his carport at home in Arona before it was returned to Irwin.

Andrea “Andi” Cartwright, marketing manager at The Lamp, said she hopes to have “uplighting” installed that would shine on the refurbished lamp.

The 6-foot lamp was removed from the theater in late April. Brady said his brother, Jon, a contractor, used a lift to take it off the marquee.

Brady did not have a truck with him, so he said he just strapped the lamp to the roof of his car and drove it all the way home. He said there were no incidents along the way and it got to his house intact.

“I got some looks coming home” on the road to Arona, Brady said.

He vowed last week that the return trip will not be the same.

“It is not going back the same way,” Brady said.

In the process of removing the lamp, Brady said he did some refurbishing of the marquee’s letters.

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Building the lamp

Brady said he built the lamp from pieces of Styrofoam that were left over from an extensive remodeling that had to be done to bring Irwin’s theater back to life in 2015.

Cutting the Styrofoam was a project unto itself because he used a chain saw to cut the 2-by-3-foot pieces.

“I shaped them into a lamp,” Brady said, then cemented four pieces of the molded Styrofoam together to create a base.

He even created a removable top for the lamp.

To give it a little authenticity, he connected a pipe from the lamp to a smoke machine inside the theater so that it would appear to be pouring out of the lamp. But the smoke created problems outside and it was disconnected from the machine, Brady said.

Brady said he had not determined the cost of the project, but said it took a lot of hours over the past several weeks to do the job.

Still, he considered it a labor of love for him to refinish what he built 10 years ago.

“I just didn’t want to see it go bad,” Brady said. “I saw it needed redone and I wanted to do it.”