Fremont Street Experience Director of Marketing Tom Bruny says the performing circles "are functioning very well. What it’s done is un-congested the mall," which can get 45,000-50,000 pedestrians on a weekend night. In the past, buskers – sometimes as many as 100 -- tended to congregate around the nexus of Fremont Street and Casino Center Drive. This impeded pedestrian access to stores and to some of the casinos. Now, with 38 defined performance zones (and comparably defined time slots), painted to resemble poker chips, "they’re not fighting over preferred positions because they all have equal opportunity with the daily lottery" for those 38 circles. "From our perspective, the city ordinance has been a positive in bettering the visitor experience."
He says he’s even gotten favorable feedback from the busker community, "because [the ordinance] provides a safer, more controlled atmosphere for everybody." During the first week of the new regimen, the Las Vegas Review-Journal sent reporter James DeHaven down to cover the action. "Newly registered buskers scattered around the five-block pedestrian mall quietly rotated in and out of their ‘performance zones’ every two hours … all did so without prompting, though fewer managed the feat without grumbling," he wrote in his dispatch.
DeHaven chatted up illusionist Sean Scott, who was dealing with one of the unintended consequences of the ordinance: You don’t get to choose your neighbor. First, he had to compete to be heard over a nearby saxophonist. He wasn’t any more fortunate with his second spot, right near the Glitter Gulch concert stage. He huddled with a fellow member of Street Performances & Artists of Nevada, and lucked into a vacant performance zone on a quiet stretch of Fifth Street.
"That's the only [issue] that still remains — being able to choose spots," Scott told DeHaven. "Otherwise, I'll spend 30 minutes walking to each location." Since their biggest advocate, the American Civil Liberties Union, was a key player in crafting the busker ordinance, the strolling-player community is going to have to live with the new rules. Some are protesting by taking their act elsewhere, particularly to the free-for-all down on Strip.
The acid test of the new rules will come when the weather heats up. At the time of the ordinance’s mid-November implementation, cold weather kept a lot of buskers off the streets, leaving the supply of performance zones outstripping demand. When things warm up, potential loopholes in the law could tested, such as the lack of a requirement that buskers give their names when entering the lottery, creating the potential for flooding it with multiple "registration accounts." Buskers could also barter and bid amongst themselves for the prime spaces. The City of Las Vegas says it has countermeasures in mind, should these scenarios come to pass, but for the moment it’s keeping a low profile and letting the buskers police themselves.
As far as the general public's concerned, we hadn't received any feedback until this QoD, so perhaps this will make good fodder for a future LVA Reader Poll.
