Fremont Street in an hour: a walk from the Plaza to El Cortez
Five blocks, nine casinos, a century of Las Vegas. A guided walk down the street most visitors only see from under the light show.
Fremont Street is five short blocks long, and it is the whole history of Las Vegas in a straight line. Start at the west end, walk east, and you go from 1906 to last year. Here is how to read it.
Main Street: the Plaza
Start at the top of the street, in front of the Plaza. The hotel opened in 1971 on the site of the Union Pacific depot, which is why Fremont Street dead-ends into it: the street was built to run from the railroad to the rest of town, and the rest of town was a few blocks of tents. The Plaza is where a lot of the great downtown views come from; its upper floors look straight down the canopy.
Across the street is the Golden Gate, which opened as the Hotel Nevada in 1906 and is the oldest hotel in Las Vegas. It had the city’s first telephone. The number was 1. It has been expanded and renovated repeatedly but it is still, structurally, the first hotel on the first corner.
Behind the Golden Gate is Circa, which opened in 2020 and is the newest. It was the first new ground-up casino resort downtown in forty years. Its sportsbook is the largest in the world by most measures, and Stadium Swim, the tiered pool with the giant screen, is the thing people come downtown to see that isn’t the canopy. Oldest hotel and newest hotel, across the street from each other, is the whole story of downtown in one intersection.
Under the canopy
The Fremont Street Experience canopy opened in 1995 and covers the street from Main to Fourth. It was built to save downtown, which in the early 1990s was losing badly to the new Strip megaresorts, and it worked well enough that the street is still here. The light show runs every hour after dark. The zipline overhead is SlotZilla, which launches from a slot-machine-shaped tower at the east end and runs the length of the canopy.
On the north side: the Golden Nugget, opened in 1946 and the most polished property downtown since Steve Wynn rebuilt it in the 1970s and ’80s. It is where the big rooms and the shark tank are. The Four Queens next door opened in 1966 and is one of the two downtown hotels that charges no resort fee.
On the south side: Binion’s, the former Horseshoe, where the World Series of Poker was born in 1970 and where the 1932 Hotel Apache rooms reopened in 2019. We have written the whole story. Beyond it, The D, which was Fitzgeralds until 2012 and is now the loudest, most sports-forward building on the block, and the Fremont, the 1956 hotel that gave the street its casino identity.
Las Vegas Boulevard: the canopy ends
At Fourth Street the canopy stops, and the character of the street changes immediately. The Downtown Grand is a block north on Third, the 2013 rebuild of the old Lady Luck. Keep walking east and you are on Fremont East, the entertainment district the city built in the late 2000s to pull the energy past the canopy. This is where the cocktail bars are, and the Container Park, the 2013 shopping and food village built out of shipping containers with a fire-breathing praying mantis at the gate.
Sixth Street: El Cortez
The walk ends at El Cortez, which opened in 1941 and is the longest continuously operating casino in Las Vegas. Bugsy Siegel owned a piece of it for about a year in 1945, before he moved on to the Flamingo. The building is on the National Register of Historic Places, which is not something you can say about anything else on the street. It has a vintage tower, a pile of old photographs, and a coffee shop that has been there longer than most of the people serving in it.
The thing to notice
Walked in one direction, Fremont Street is a timeline. Walked back the other way, it is a price list: El Cortez and the Four Queens and Binion’s in the middle are the cheap rooms; Circa and the Golden Nugget at the west end are the expensive ones; everything is within five minutes’ walk of everything else. There is nowhere else in Las Vegas where that is true.
Fremont Streetwalking tourGolden GateEl CortezFremont East