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| - Don't come downtown thinking you are going to be amused with more of the amusement park that has become the Strip.
The cultural and historic hub of Las Vegas is where Fremont and Main Streets interface, creating an experience truly distinct from - and totally unlike - the South Strip. When you want to get down and dirty with the quarter slots, a weathered cocktail waitress in a tawdry cowgirl outfit under the video'd canopy of Fremont Street, then belly up to the five dollar buffet at three in the morning to wash it all down with a top sirloin, downtown Vegas is the place to be.
Essentially established in 1905 as the City's main thoroughfare, Fremont Street was Las Vegas' first paved street. The area drew a few wealthy entrepreneurs seeking to capitalize on the cross-country migrations of GI's. Those entrepreneurs became the great casino magnates, and together with key Hollywood celebrities, built an empire around the Northern Club, Horseshoe, Golden Nugget, Golden Gate, Apache and Fremont hotels, the original resorts of Glitter Gulch.
Starting in 1941 with the El Rancho, and then with the emergence of the large Strip resorts and the famed "Rat Pack" in the fifties, the downtown area began to fall slowly into disrepair and decline.
In 1995, the entire downtown area received a desperately needed facelift in the form of the "Fremont Street Experience" during which five street blocks, between Main and South Las Vegas Boulevard, were fitted with a mammoth LED video canopy, the street was closed to vehicles and converted into a pedestrian promenade, and the landscape completely overhauled in a proud celebration of downtown's neon gaming heritage.
Today, Fremont Street is an amazing, if not shocking, juxtaposition of cultures. This way of life won't be found on the Strip or anywhere else in Las Vegas; millions of blinding lights provide a veneer of polished entertainment, thinly veiling a crude scene tucked away in the darkness just beyond the canopy of lights in the odd dark alley or corner, as the real Fremont Street "experience" unfolds in a vast spectacle starring the lowest ilk of the City. This is where the City's street denizens - prostitutes, muggers, hobos, drug dealers, addicts, rapists, thieves, other unsavories, and the simply homeless - execute their nightly rituals of survival. Come downtown to be fascinated, not simply to be amused.
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