HOLLYWOOD — Ignacio Berríos, who spent fifty-one years bending glass tubing over open flame in a shop off Santa Monica Boulevard and whose work still burns above a dozen Los Angeles streets, died July 16 at a care home in Glendale. He was 90.

His daughter Consuelo said the cause was pneumonia.

Mr. Berríos was a neon bender, which is a trade and not a job title. The work is done standing, with a ribbon burner and a length of clear glass tube, using a rubber blowhose held in the teeth so both hands stay free. The glass is heated until it slumps, bent against a paper pattern laid on an asbestos-topped table, and blown back to round with a puff of breath in the instant before it cools. The tube is then filled with gas — neon for red and orange, argon with a trace of mercury for blues, and a coating inside the glass for everything else — and made to glow.

None of it can be done by machine. This was Mr. Berríos’s favorite fact about his own life, and he mentioned it, according to his family, roughly weekly for seventy years.

He was born in 1936 in Boyle Heights, the son of a plasterer, and left high school at sixteen to sweep floors at a sign shop on Santa Monica Boulevard where the benders worked behind a canvas curtain. He watched through a gap in the canvas for eight months before anyone let him hold a tube. The man who eventually did, a Polish immigrant named Wojciech Stelmach whom Mr. Berríos referred to for the rest of his life as “my professor,” gave him a two-sentence education that Mr. Berríos passed on verbatim to everyone he trained.

The first sentence was: the glass will tell you when it is ready. The second was: you are not in a hurry, you only think you are.

He worked in that shop until 1971 and then bought it, at a moment when nearly everyone in the trade agreed that buying a neon shop was a mistake. The city had spent two decades restricting new neon signage; plastic-faced boxes lit from behind by fluorescent tubes were cheaper, brighter and legal in places neon was not. Between 1960 and 1980 the number of working benders in Los Angeles fell by something close to nine-tenths.

Mr. Berríos survived it by changing what he made. Where the sixties had been storefronts, the seventies and eighties were repairs, restorations, one-off pieces for restaurants, and a great deal of quiet work for the studios — practical neon for sets, which had to look forty years old on camera and be built in nine days. He kept a folder of studio patterns that his family has donated, at his instruction, to a preservation archive.

He was, by every account, a difficult man to hire and an easy man to know. He turned down work he considered ugly and said so to the customer’s face. He charged the same rate to a restaurant chain and to a family taqueria, on the grounds that the tube did not know the difference. He worked six days a week until he was 84 and then, after a fall, three days a week until he was 87.

He also taught, without any of the formality that word implies: eleven apprentices across five decades, most of them people who wandered in, several of whom did not last a month. One of the ones who lasted was Reuben Ostrander, who spent three weeks this spring matching a rose-gold that could not be bought in order to relight the HAROLD’S sign over Cahuenga Boulevard, dark since the 1980s — a restoration this paper wrote about in June.

Mr. Ostrander, reached this week, said he had brought his teacher a photograph of the finished sign in early July and that Mr. Berríos looked at it for a while and then asked what he had used for the second stroke of the R.

“I told him. He said it was the right choice, and then he said, ‘You rushed the bottom of the S,’” Mr. Ostrander said. “And I had. I absolutely had. Nobody else in the world could have seen it in a photograph.”

Mr. Berríos’s wife of fifty-eight years, Amparo, died in 2019. He is survived by his daughter Consuelo, of Glendale; a son, Feliciano, of Whittier; six grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.

The shop closed in 2023 and its equipment — the burners, the tables, the pattern folders and a coffee can of mercury that had to be handled by a specialist — went to two former apprentices. His family said he asked for no service and made one request about the shop’s front window, a small blue script piece he had bent himself in 1974.

He wanted it left on.