Frommer's Las Vegas 2004

3401 Industrial Rd. & 702/309-7200. www.elvisarama.com. Admission $9.95 adults, $7.95 seniors, students
with ID, and Nevada residents; free for kids under 12. Daily 10am–6pm. Call for free shuttle bus.
Fremont Street Experience For some years, downtown Vegas has been
losing ground to the Strip. But thanks to a $70 million revitalization project,
that’s starting to change. Fremont Street, the heart of “Glitter Gulch,” has been
closed off and turned into a pedestrian mall. The Fremont Street Experience is
a 5-block open-air pedestrian mall, a landscaped strip of outdoor cafes, vendor
carts, and colorful kiosks purveying food and merchandise. Overhead is a 90-foothigh
steel-mesh “celestial vault”; at night, it is the Sky Parade, a high-tech lightand-laser
show (the canopy is equipped with more than 2.1 million lights)
enhanced by a concert-hall-quality sound system, which takes place four times
nightly. But there’s music between shows, as well. Not only does the canopy provide
shade, it cools the area through a misting system in summer and warms you
with radiant heaters in winter. The difference
this makes cannot be overemphasized;
what was once a ghost town
of tacky, rapidly aging buildings, in an
area with more undesirables than not,
is now a bustling (at least at night),
friendly, safe place (they have private
security guards who hustle said undesirables
away). It’s a place where you
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Tips Insider Info
A good place to view the Sky
Parade light show is from the
balcony at Fitzgeralds Hotel &
Casino.
can stroll, eat, or even dance to the music under the lights. The crowd it attracts
is more upscale than in years past, and of course, it’s a lot less crowded than the
hectic Strip. Some rightly mourn the passing of cruising Glitter Gulch, gawking
at the original lights. It does indeed mean the end of classic Las Vegas, but on
the other hand, classic Las Vegas was dead and nearly buried anyway. This has
given a second life to a deserving neighborhood.
And in a further effort to retain as much of classic Las Vegas as possible, the
Neon Museum is installing vintage hotel and casino signs along the promenade.
The first installation is the horse and rider from the old Hacienda, which presently
rides the sky over the intersection of Fremont and Las Vegas Boulevard. Eventually,
the Neon Museum hopes to have an indoor installation a couple of blocks
from the Fremont Street Experience to showcase some of the smaller signs they
have collected. It’s uncertain when it will open, but in the meantime the Neon
Graveyard is there and it’s amusing to see the (unlit, of course) old signs languishing
away until they once again get lit up in their glittery glory.
Fremont St. (between Main St. and Las Vegas Blvd.), Downtown. www.vegasexperience.com. Free admission.
Shows nightly every hour on the hour after dark.
GameWorks What do you get when Steven Spielberg and his Dream-
Works team get in on the arcade video-game action? Grown-up state-of-the-art
fun. High-tech movie magic has taken over all sorts of traditional arcade games
and turned them interactive, from a virtual-reality batting cage to a Jurassic Park
game that lets you hunt dinosaurs. There are motion-simulator rides galore and
even actual-motion activities like rock climbing. But classic games, from Pac-
Man to pool tables, are here too, though sometimes with surprising twists, such
as air hockey where multiple pucks occasionally shoot out at once.
All this doesn’t exactly come cheap. There are two routes to pricing. First is
the standard version where $15 gets you $15 in game play, $20 gets you $25, or