North of the Strip, Downtown Las Vegas is another world. Sure, there’s been a splash of paint here and an outrageously uninteresting electronic canopy there, but Downtown hadn’t changed much in spirit for decades.
In the 1930s and ’40s, hotels and casinos dotted Fremont Street, then the city’s main commercial drag. But the rise of the Strip and suburban expansion drew trade away from Downtown. The construction of the Fremont Street Experience in 1995, which turned a five-block section of the road into a pedestrian-friendly gambling mall and covered it with a canopy that screens light and sound shows, succeeded in luring some tourists back to Glitter Gulch. Then a 21st-century Downtown began to sprout in 2006. Huge cranes and land-movers arrived, bringing steel beams, glass panes and concrete. With them came entrepreneurs armed with small-scale business plans and modest amounts of capital.
Now there’s never been a better time to discover Downtown, an amorphous amalgamation of things gone right and wrong. By turns sleazy and chic, downcast and upmarket, desperate and enthusiastic, it’s a section of town in which constant and concerted efforts to make something incredible have failed only in specificity. Something wonderful is emerging, just not quite as originally intended.
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