Today we offer the concluding part to the history of the FSE, picking up the story where we left off yesterday:
Outside the canopy, there was eventually a spillover effect on "Fremont East," as that stretch of street became known. It was transformed into a busy warren of bars, restaurants, nightclubs, and coffee shops, culminating at the El Cortez. Companies like Tamares Group made commercial leases affordable, the City offered reduced some of its license fees as an incentive and helping hand for new businesses trying to get off the ground, and the upside of the Great Recession was that what were meant to be high-end condos became affordable housing.
Some of the luster of the FSE itself, however, was lost by association soon after, however, when the city plowed $100 million into Neonopolis, which opened in 2002. It was an ill-designed mall (from the outside it looks more like a bunker) that was intended to diversify downtown's appeal. But it was far less than full with tenants when it opened and those who were there soon fled or went under. (Remember the Poker Dome? Not to mention KRAVE Massive, to name but two.) Neonopolis manager Rohit Joshi frequently made headlines, either with optimistic announcements of coming attractions that failed to materialize (like Star Trek: The Experience), or else thanks to financial troubles of his own making, as when the mall's air-conditioning was cut off. Only the local Telemundo station survived that crisis unruffled – because it had had the foresight to install freestanding air conditioning of its own.
The original Fremont Street Experience was a somewhat cumbersome contraption, comprising 30 screens run by 30 computers. And if something went wrong with one screen, all 30 went down while technicians repaired the problem. It was also an energy-inefficient system, requiring 2.1 million incandescent light bulbs. Then, in the summer of 2004, the city unveiled a new, energy-conserving iteration of the FSE. The number of screens was cut from 30 to eight (without any reduction in the size of the 1,356-foot-long canopy). The light bulbs gave way to more eco-friendly light-emitting diodes. While more LEDs were needed – 12.5 million of them – they consumed less power and could be bunched more closely together: three times tighter than the previous sprawl of incandescent bulbs.
The technological advance not only meant that the FSE got more bang for its buck, it also enabled 16.7 million color combinations, live video feeds, and both split- and rotating screens. Eight supercomputers – with 10,000 gigabytes of storage -- feed a synchronized HDTV stream into the canopy. The video is augmented by 218 overhead speakers and 220 supplementary ones stationed along the four-block length of the Experience.
University of Nevada Las Vegas history professor Michael Green concludes, "Las Vegas, like a lot of American cities, suffered from flight to the suburbs. Obviously, each city reacted in its own way. Growing up in the 1970s, I can remember discussion about the need to revitalize downtown. Jan Jones tried hard and, at least at the time, the Fremont Street Experience was a terrific addition." As the Experience continues to present new programming and to rein in the buskers whose ubiquity has rubbed some pedestrians (and casinos) the wrong way, many would argue that it still is a terrific addition to downtown. For those of us who have been coming to Vegas since the canopy's inception, it's hard to imagine Glitter Gulch without it.
