The Fremont Street Experience and the Death of Old Downtown

The canopy went up in nineteen ninety-five. It cost about sixty-three million dollars, covered four city blocks, and used thousands of incandescent bulbs to create what was then the world's largest animated light display; the canopy was not upgraded to LED technology until two thousand four. It was a last attempt by downtown Las Vegas casino owners to compete with the Strip that had been eclipsing them for thirty years.

Fremont Street had been the center of Las Vegas gambling since the nineteen thirties. The Golden Gate Hotel, which opened as the Hotel Nevada in January of nineteen oh six, was the first hotel in the city. The Fremont, the Golden Nugget, the Horseshoe, and others had defined Las Vegas for tourists who came before the Strip had a name. By the time the Mirage opened in nineteen eighty-nine with its artificial volcano, its white tigers, and its deliberately otherworldly scale, the competition was no longer between downtown casinos. It was between the old Las Vegas and a new one that had decided bigger was the only direction.

The irony of the Fremont Street Experience canopy is that it covered and preserved the streetscape at the moment when the original buildings that made the streetscape were mostly already gone. The neon signs that had made Fremont Street famous had been coming down for decades. The canopy was built to honor a street that had already been substantially demolished.

What you walk under now is an entertainment venue that refers to a history while standing in the place where that history happened. The Golden Gate is still there, at the corner of Fremont and Main, the oldest operating hotel in Las Vegas. Walk inside it and you are in the same building where railroad workers checked in after the town was incorporated in nineteen oh five.