The Fremont Street Experience opened on December 14, 1995. It covers Fremont Street from Main to Fourth, four blocks, with a steel-frame canopy ninety feet high at its peak, and closes the street beneath it to traffic. It was built as a rescue. By the early 1990s the new megaresorts on the Strip were drawing the city’s visitors south, downtown’s share of gaming revenue was falling, and the casino owners on Fremont, who had never worked together on much, agreed to a single project to keep the street alive.
Thirty years on it is the reason downtown Las Vegas still exists as a visitor district.
The deal
The project cost about $70 million. The downtown casinos put in roughly a third through a special assessment district, the City of Las Vegas and its redevelopment agency contributed the rest, and the casinos formed a company, the Fremont Street Experience LLC, to operate it. The structure still works that way: the casinos that front the canopy own and run the Experience, with the city as landlord of the street.
The design came from Jon Jerde, the Los Angeles architect whose firm had done Horton Plaza in San Diego and the Mall of America. Jerde’s canopy was a space-frame arch with 2.1 million incandescent bulbs on its underside, programmed to show six-minute light-and-sound shows on the hour after dark. The street beneath was pedestrianized, repaved, and lined with kiosks.
Upgrades
The incandescent bulbs were replaced with LED panels in 2004, for about $17 million, which turned the canopy into a video screen and made the shows considerably brighter. A second replacement in 2019, for $32 million, installed the current screen: 16.4 million pixels across roughly 1,375 feet, at the time the largest video screen in the world. The canopy’s shows are now full-motion video, and the system runs programming for most of the evening rather than only on the hour.
SlotZilla, a pair of ziplines that run the length of the canopy from a tower shaped like a slot machine at the east end, opened in 2014. The lower line runs at canopy-bulb height; the upper line, the “Zoomline,” runs riders prone beneath the screen from the top of the tower to a landing at the Golden Gate.
Three permanent stages were added along the street for concerts, which the Experience programs most nights and for the city’s large public events.
What it changed
The canopy did what it was built to do. Downtown’s gaming revenue stabilized through the late 1990s, the casinos that fronted it survived, and the street became a destination in its own right rather than a cheaper alternative to the Strip. It also changed the character of the place. Fremont Street before 1995 was a road with casinos along it, lit by the casinos’ own neon; the Pioneer Club’s Vegas Vic and the Golden Nugget’s sign were the landmarks. After 1995 it was a covered mall with a show, and the casino fronts became walls of the mall.
The Experience has had a second effect that took longer to show: the blocks east of the canopy, where it ends at Fourth, were left out. The city’s answer, the Fremont East district designated in 2007, was built to carry the crowd past the canopy’s end, and the independent bars and restaurants there are now where much of downtown’s growth has happened.
2026
The canopy marks its thirtieth year in December. The Experience company has not announced a further screen replacement; the 2019 system is expected to run into the 2030s. The street beneath it is the busiest pedestrian space in Nevada on a Saturday night, and the casino owners who built it to save their properties have, for the most part, kept them.