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Las Vegas downtown shines
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February 13, 1997: 9:16 p.m. ET
High-tech lights, sound, computers bring Fremont Street into the limelight
From Correspondent Steve Young
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LAS VEGAS (CNNfn) - Fremont Street, Las Vegas, is like nothing you've ever seen before.
The nightly overhead show, paid for by merchants, the city and the state of Nevada, cost $70 million to create. It uses 500,000 watts of audio power and more than two million lights.
This high-tech patch of urban renewal is six blocks long, and it takes a squad of computers to keep it on track. It's the biggest graphics display system in the world, bigger by far than anything in Times Square or Tokyo's Ginza.
Dozens of control computers are up in the light vault, stretching across the width of Fremont Street. Many more help operators coordinate from a nearby control room.
It's a far cry from the sleepy Fremont Street of several decades ago. Construction started on the technical extravaganza about four years ago, when downtown gambling casinos complained tourists were deserting them for casinos on the Levas strip.
Now, tourists are flocking back to Fremont with mouths agape.
"It's pulled us here. We'll come back," one Vegas visitor said. "Fantastic. Very impressed. Whatever it cost them, it was well worth the money."
For a downtown that was ignored just several years ago, the crowds are a sight for sore eyes.
"On a nightly basis we've gone from four years ago, having maybe 100 out on the mall, to now presenting to over 20,000 people nightly," Wyatt DeFreitas, operations director for Fremont Street Experience, said.
Fremont Street just shows what a lot of high technology, and a little sex appeal, can do.
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