"In the late 1980s, downtown appeared to be in deep trouble," writes Mob Museum historian Geoff Schumacher in his Sun, Sin & Suburbia. The smash-hit success of Steve Wynn's Mirage in 1989 was spurring a gallop of reinvention along the Strip. The phenomenon of the suburban locals casino was on the rise, further cutting into downtown's customer base, and convenience gambling was coming to Las Vegas' domestic feeder markets.
At first, the City of Las Vegas poured $17 million in public funds into entrepreneur Bob Snow's conversion of the Park Hotel into Victorian-themed, $82 million Main Street Station. "It was a failure almost as soon as it opened on August 30, 1991," Schumacher writes. It would be bankrupt by December and out of business in 10 months. It also pissed off rival casino owners, who didn't take kindly to seeing civic monies invested in a competing property. The Las Vegas Sun opined that it was "almost a textbook case in how not to spend public money … You don't rejuvenate a neighborhood by competing with existing businesses across the street." (For more, see QoD Archives 7/28/15 and 11/27/15.)
The next move was to bring all the downtown casino owners and Mayor Jan Laverty Jones to the table to try and brainstorm a new form of downtown attraction. "We need our own volcano," said Golden Gate then-owner Mark Brandenburg, referring to the Mirage's signature attraction. As Brandenburg recalled to Casino Executive Magazine, Steve Wynn proposed a series of canals, complete with gondoliers – "Las Venice" – wending their way downtown. Objections to this plan were lodged by Jack Binion, for one, who thought the waterways were too much, too soon. (Brandenburg said he remembered the meeting at the Golden Nugget, in part, because it was the first time he had tiramisu.)
Theme-park developer Gary Goddard pitched a full-sized replica of the Starship Enterprise from Star Trek, a project so big it would have dwarfed the casinos along Glitter Gulch. According to an interview with Goddard, his Enterprise edged out the Fremont Street Experience … until Paramount Pictures CEO Stanley Jaffe shot it down. (See QoD 2/1/16.)
Schumacher records a different chronology, with Goddard already out of the picture before the Fremont Street Experience was conceived. Again, Steve Wynn was instrumental, bringing in designer Jon Jerde to dream up what would become the FSE. By confining traffic on Fremont Street to pedestrians, the canopy would become "in essence, a foyer for the Glitter Gulch casinos."
The $70 million private-public partnership, once unveiled, was viewed as a success, especially by those who spearheaded it. Without, "Fremont Street would have died a slow, painful death," Jones told Schumacher. "People were looking to move out … It would have become a seedy, challenged area." Added Brandenburg, "I don't think anybody who's been in business downtown would tell you that we would still be here today if it weren't for the Fremont Street Experience." He attributes the achievement of the FSE to willingness of its backers to leave their egos at the door: "They all bit their tongues at the appropriate times and decided they needed to compromise because they knew if they didn't build this they would dry up and blow away." Indeed, Brandenburg's own Golden Gate prospered so handsomely that he was eventually able to cash out to Detroit entrepreneur Derek Stevens. "To me this should be a case study for business schools," is his verdict.
If there is a problem under the canopy, it is with the casinos themselves, several of which are still stuck in a 20th century time warp. A millennial wave of new owners – Terry Caudill, Barrick Gaming, Poster Financial Group, the late Don Barden – came and, in most cases, went without markedly transforming their properties. Only Stevens and peppery Tilman Fertitta at the Golden Nugget have had a transformative effect, to date.
Tomorrow -- Part II: Fremont East, Neonopolis, and the evolution of the Viva Vision canopy.
