Las Vegas Attractions

Venue: Fremont Street Experience and Neon Museum    When: Daily

The Fremont Street Experience offers heritage Las Vegas-style, where neon meets nostalgia.

When you consider the short, gaudy history of this city in the desert, it all makes perfect sense: little more than a railroad town within living memory, Vegas took off with the advent of legal casino gambling, coming into its own in the 1960s. Downtown was always the downmarket end, while the swanky hotels stretched out on the Strip. The decline of downtown coincided neatly with the redevelopment of the Strip, which replaced the likes of the Dunes and the Sands with mega-resorts like the MGM Grand and the Bellagio. Out of this conjunction was born the Fremont Street Experience.

While other medium-size American towns bricked over Main Street and put in fancy lampposts, Fremont Street was done up in Vegas style, with a glass barrel arch covering over the street, turning it into a mall connecting ten casinos.

It's all very much in the old Las Vegas tradition - copious water and freebies. A misting system fights the fierce heat, while free food and drink carry on the ways of old. Piped music and nightly live shows keep the punters amused. Sound and light shows at dusk are measured in large numbers - 540,000 watts of stereo, two million lights.

For connoisseurs of Vegas' special aesthetic, all this is mere prologue for the Neon Museum, which preserves neon signs from the glory days of pre-respectable Las Vegas. Saved from the wrecker's ball, these signs live on as a reminder of the days of mechanical slots, gratis sirloins and Sammy Davis Jr.