Fremont Street was Lit up 27 Years Ago

Next Wednesday marks the 27th anniversary of the day in 1995 that they first lit up the Fremont Street Experience. That’s long enough ago for many to have forgotten or never even imagined its life before the giant video canopy, before (ugh) Slotzilla.

This photo, sent in by reader Jenna Cherry, gives us a glimpse of that previous life. “This photo was taken on Fremont Street around 1970 or a couple of years prior,” she writes. “It was used as a postcard to advertise my grandfather's and business partners' towing company.” What immediately jumps out, besides the cool old vehicles, is the human scale of the scene — sure, there’s plenty of neon, but none of the bombast of FSE now. And 1970 was probably the last time you could shut down Fremont for a towing company photo shoot.

Back in the early 1990s, struggling downtown was thought to need a super-size entry in the “experience economy” to avoid being decimated by the Strip’s megaresort surge. “Downtown would have died” if they hadn’t done something, then-mayor Jan Jones says in Geoff Schumacher’s Sun, Sin & Suburbia: The History of Modern Las Vegas. Because Las Vegas’ sincerest belief is that you can solve any problem by throwing spectacle at it, a bonkers videodome became the solution (a frankly better one than Steve Wynn’s proposal to replace downtown streets with canals). 

And the view from the skyboxes is that it worked. “We turned it around with the Fremont Street Experience,” casino owner Bill Boyd told Schumacher. Downtown didn’t die. Indeed, last month downtown casinos posted their biggest win ever.

But “turned it around” has a different meaning to those long-timers who believe the gaudy Experience ruined one of the best parts of downtown. They still cherish the raffish, uncapped Glitter Gulch, which by now has been so throughly superseded that the modern street feels like a dead link to its own past, which now exists mostly in photos like this.