Downtown Las Vegas has never been a "downtown" in the
conventional sense of the word. True, it does stand on the site
where the city was founded, a century ago. Having just laid its
tracks across the valley, the San Pedro, Los Angeles & Salt
Lake Railroad established Las Vegas in May 1905 by auctioning
parcels of land close to the railroad station. A simple grid was
mapped out, with the station itself on Main Street at the head of
the principal thoroughfare, Fremont Street .
However, the city never grew to any size before the legalization
of gambling in the 1930s; even in 1940, it had a population of just
eight thousand. Fremont Street failed to develop a significant
infrastructure of stores and other businesses, and those few it did
acquire were in any case to be supplanted by the advent of the
casinos. In time, the neighboring streets filled up with the
offices of state and city administrators, but the downtown area
remains much like the Strip in that the only conceivable reason to
come here is to visit the casinos.
Las Vegas has always had the strongest of incentives to promote
downtown at the expense of the Strip; the Strip is not in fact in
the city at all, but in Clark County, so only the downtown casinos
pay city taxes. In the 1940s, it officially baptized Fremont Street
as " Glitter Gulch ," and for several decades downtown more
or less kept pace with the burgeoning Strip. At the time the
Mirage opened on the Strip in 1989, for example, the veteran
Horseshoe downtown remained the city's most financially
successful casino.
However, as the Strip raced ahead during its 1990s building
boom, downtown appeared to be in terminal decline. It was clear
that something drastic had to be done. One proposal, put forward by
Steve Wynn of the Golden Nugget , was to turn Fremont Street
into a Venetian-style canal. The ultimate solution was almost as
absurd; a roof was put over the strip. As the Fremont
Street Experience , it has become the scene of banal but
undeniably spectacular nightly light shows. These have done a
certain amount to entice the crowds back, although many visitors
are disappointed to find that there's nothing to do once the show's
over - except gamble, of course, which was the point of the thing.
Despite the promises of Mayor Oscar Goodman, however, who has
proclaimed downtown redevelopment to be the cornerstone of his
administration, downtown continues to operate at an overall loss,
and few observers seriously expect the forthcoming, much-postponed
Neonopolis shopping and entertainment complex to change
that.
Fremont Street today is downtown restyled as a sanitized
suburban mall, its block-spanning casinos now seeming like little
more than identical department stores. It has to be said that none
of them downtown, not even the much-vaunted Golden Nugget ,
would merit a second glance on the Strip. If you come to Las Vegas
specifically to gamble, there's a strong case for spending time
downtown - the odds tend to be better, the room rates cheaper and
the atmosphere a bit more casual - but otherwise you miss little by
avoiding it altogether.
Downtown used to be seen as an area where you could walk around,
in contrast to the Strip where you were forced to drive. Nowadays,
however, the gaps that formerly peppered the Strip have all but
disappeared, and most visitors explore sizeable stretches of it on
foot. Downtown, on the other hand, offers little scope for
strolling anywhere other than the few central blocks of Fremont
Street. The streets to the south hold the occasional interesting
shop, like the Attic or the Gamblers General Store, or budget
restaurant, but although they may seem close enough on the map,
they're grim and unsettling places to walk, and unbearably hot in
summer