Knowing my niece and her husband make a trek to the gambling mecca often, I contacted her for advice on where to stay. It was night and street photography that was our lure. None of us are gamblers, that wasn’t the attraction. Though I went there annually to attend Information Technology conferences for my work in the late 90s and early 2000s, since my retirement, we’d not been there and Fred hadn’t been there in over a couple decades.
We were to discover that the area was basically shut down for the season.
What brought us to the downtown area came about during a telephone visit with our friend, Fred Mast, originally suggesting a photo trip to the four-corners area of Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado meet. The pedestrian mall is now a major downtown attraction with two levels of ziplines traversing the giant electronic canopy. The attraction helped to revitalize downtown Las Vegas because the Las Vegas Boulevard “Strip” of casinos and resort properties was sucking the tourist business away from downtown. Twenty-five years ago, legal procedures were in place for the creation of a street mall and entertainment venue in downtown Las Vegas called the “Fremont Experience.” Closure of part of Fremont Street to vehicular traffic and construction on the venue started in 1994.
