Las Vegas: Fremont Street

[jducoeur]

While it was by no means the high point of the vacation, it's worth talking a little about the sheer craziness that is The Fremont Street Experience. The Golden Nugget is on Fremont Street, and yes, the "Experience" is part of the official name.

I had originally assumed that that was pretentious, but yeah -- it's an experience all right. For several blocks, it's a pedestrian plaza, and it is just about the loudest place I've ever been. It's almost civilized in the morning, but by midafternoon there are stages blasting cover bands and DJs every few blocks: mid-evening, we could barely hear each other yell, when standing side-by-side.

The street is covered with an arched roof, running the full several blocks, so it's hard to quite call it "outside". (I didn't mask, but I did seriously think about it.) The inside of the roof is completely lined with LEDs, showing graphics that may have sometimes been sync'ed to the music.

Approximately every hundred feet is a bar, serving on the street. Most of them have a wall of frozen drink machines -- which are served in yard glasses, of course.

It would all be horribly hot, but between the fact that it is roofed, and there are doors opening onto air-conditioned casinos everywhere, so it's actually weirdly pleasant until you step off of Fremont into the sun.

(All of this was made even crazier by the enormous festival of music, food, and general bacchanalia down in Container Park, at the end of the street, taking up something like sixteen square blocks that were closed off for the duration. Around 6pm, it turned into a river of pedestrians heading in that direction.)

Basically, the overall effect is Bourbon Street during Mardi Gras, except without the soul and the good music. It is, indeed, an experience -- but not really our style...