Fremont Street

In the early 1900's, Fremont Street in downtown Las Vegas, named after explorer John C. Fremont, was a dusty street lined with canvas tents bearing hand-painted wooden signs and serving as hotels, saloons, shops, and banks. As Las Vegas changed from a frontier town into a neon-lined gambling center, Fremont Street remained its downtown heart, where residents shopped, teenagers cruised, and tourists played. The tents gave way to wood, brick, and concrete block buildings in Romanesque, Victorian, and Greek Revival styles, with wide arcades, broad canopies, high false fronts, boardwalks, and angled corner entrances. The Golden Gate Hotel and Casino, then the Hotel Nevada, opened in 1906 at One Fremont Street and became the most historic survivor of that era; it was built primarily of concrete by John F. Miller, who had won the corner lot in the 1905 land auction that created the new town of Las Vegas. Tourism surged with Hoover Dam's construction and the legalization of gambling in the early 1930s, and Las Vegas promoted a Wild West theme that drew thousands of visitors. Smaller businesses along Fremont Street were largely replaced by "sawdust joints" such as the Frontier Club and Hotel Apache, whose signs rose above the rooftops in ornate western lettering and bright neon colors. In the 1940s, neon expanded dramatically as signs grew larger, more inventive, and more competitive, while modern streamline styles appeared and casinos added lighted overhead canopies and large rounded flashing corners. Sign heights continued to rise, including the Las Vegas Club sign, which stood 120 feet above the sidewalk, and rooftop open-frame signs and large marquees created neon wraps over entire facades, most spectacularly at the Golden Nugget in 1956. In the 1950s and 1960s, high-rise towers permanently changed the scale of Fremont Street, and casinos expanded by absorbing neighboring businesses, as with the Horseshoe Club's takeover of Boulder Club and later the Mint. Wild West imagery endured in the 1951 Vegas Vic sign atop the Pioneer Club, greeting visitors with "Howdy Podner." In 1995, the Fremont Street Experience added the Viva Vision canopy, built with over 12 million LED lights and a 550,000-watt sound system, dazzling more than 25,000 visitors nightly with free light and sound shows; despite a century of change, much of Las Vegas history still survives beneath Fremont Street's layers of neon.

Las Vegas, Nevada · United States