LAS VEGAS – The oldest section of the City of Neon is banking big on the world's largest LED display to help save it.
The Fremont Street Experience, an hourly downtown Las Vegas video show displayed free on the underside of a 4.5-block-long metal canopy, is undergoing a $17 million conversion from incandescent lights to LED lamps to be unveiled by early July. The aim is to give tourists a reason to visit the slumping casino core instead of the more famous and popular Las Vegas Strip.
Fremont officials figured that competing for attention and market share with the Strip's mega-resorts would require a titanic effort, so their new LED display features more than 12.5 million LED lamps with 4.1 million pixels and the capability to show 16.7 million different colors. The whole screen runs the equivalent of more than four football fields.
All that will provide visitors with a rotating schedule of eight-minute shows at the top of after-dark hours that will feature a mixture of animation, live action and music. That's similar to what's already offered, but the graphics will be exponentially better, and the display will cost significantly less to maintain and will be able to broadcast live video feeds for special events.
To date, the largest publicly displayed LED screens are the Reuters and Nasdaq billboards in Times Square. Neither provides audio with its pictures and both are primarily advertising, not entertainment, vehicles. In Vegas, the Fremont Street Experience is primarily an attraction, although Fremont officials said LG Electronics will be extensively promoted in a variety of undisclosed ways as part of the deal that led the Seoul-based company to front $5 million in equipment for the upgrade.
"The new canopy is such an extreme technological advancement that it's astounding," said Mike Darley, vice president and general manager of Fitzgeralds Casino, which sits on the west end of the canopy. "It's such a unique product and delivery system that will really invigorate the downtown area."
To viewers, the hourly show appears as one continuous, somewhat overwhelming four-block-long image – and it's programmed that way by teams of animators who spend as much as four months to create the shows. But what viewers won't be able to see is that the image – and the "screen" – is broken down into eight sections, each managed by a separate computer responsible for displaying its portion of the image in sync with the others.
By comparison, the old incandescent display was made up of 30 sections, each with a computer handling it from atop the canopy. If one went down, the entire show had to be turned off while a technician climbed on top of the structure to repair it, Fremont Street Experience operations manager Danny Murphy said. The eight new computers are inside the operations room, so they can be fixed – or backed up by other computers – faster and more easily, he said.
There are three times more LED lamps than incandescent lamps, with the LED lamps 2 inches apart, compared with the old bulbs' 6-inch spacing.
With more pixels closer together, the image is exponentially clearer than the old display and boasts far more sophisticated color and graphics.
"In the past, we've had to dumb down our production quality to make it look good because of the limitations of the old technology," Murphy said. "Before, you could barely make out the faces on the dancing girls. Now they'll look like girls instead of blobs of hair. It will be incredible."
The 10 casino-hotels lining the Experience are banking on it, having provided much of the initial $70 million for the original construction back in 1995. The city permanently shut down Fremont Street to cars in late 1994 to create the mall where pedestrians can easily slip in and out of the casinos to watch the show. At the top of the hour when the show starts, the hotels shut off their neon marquees, including such recognizable icons as the cowboy Vegas Vic.
But the canopy proved to be one of the few significant development efforts for downtown Las Vegas in the 1990s. Unfortunately, without additional development projects, the area grew quaint and seedy, and slipped further behind as shiny new billion-dollar properties with fantastical themes sprang up on the Strip.
The LED improvement is one of the few current efforts to spruce up downtown's appeal. Dot-com millionaires and childhood pals Tim Breitling and Tom Poster have bought the Golden Nugget casino-hotel and are trying to render its image as hip and celeb-friendly as that of the Palms, and rumors of totally razing and rebuilding some of the older, decrepit properties abound.
"If we can come up with a new reason, like the new technology, and give them a compelling reason to come down here, they'll come," said Joseph R. Schillaci, president and CEO of the Fremont Street Experience, the entity that manages the property. "We're never going to be the No. 1 attraction here, but if we can raise our status from eighth to fifth or something like that, that would be a nice upswing for us."
The conversion also comes a year before Las Vegas observes its centennial, so the canopy and pedestrian mall figure to play a significant role in that celebration. Fremont was the first paved street in the city and home to its first casino decades before the flamboyant Strip, 8 miles to the south, was even a glint in Bugsy Siegel's eye. The first traffic light, elevator and high-rise in the county were all erected here.
Still, some observers question whether the light show alone can jump-start the area.
"The Fremont Street Experience is one of the best attractions in Las Vegas, and I think the upgrades are a fantastic idea, but it's only a key step in an overall plan that, hopefully, somebody has," said Rick Garman, owner of Vegas4Visitors.com. "I'm just not sure anybody does."
Among Garman's suggestions is to run the light show more than once an hour, an idea that casino owners reject as being too distracting to their gambling operations.
"Our mission here is to bring critical mass downtown, but the reason we're bringing them downtown is to get them into our casinos," Schillaci said. "The sound and light show is a means to an end."
