Fremont Street: Old Vegas, Original Sin

Where Las Vegas gambling actually began, where Benny Binion hung his hat, and where the Hangover's chaos finally landed.

Before the Strip existed, Fremont Street was Las Vegas. The town's first hotel went up on this street in 1906, the first gaming licences of the modern era were issued to its clubs in 1931, and for decades its wall of neon, Vegas Vic waving from the Pioneer Club above it, was the postcard image of American gambling. The Strip was built by people who learned the trade downtown.

Binion's street

No address matters more to this site's mythology than the Horseshoe, the casino Benny Binion opened on Fremont in 1951 with no betting limits and a million dollars in the window. The World Series of Poker was born there in 1970 and stayed downtown for its first three and a half decades. The Horseshoe's spirit, respect the gambler, print the real odds, is the closest thing the Bandit has to a patron saint, minus the felony record.

The Hangover comes downtown

Hollywood mostly shoots the Strip, but The Hangover Part III gave downtown its due: Chow parachutes off the roofline and lands on the minivan outside the California Hotel before careening down Main Street toward the Plaza, and Alan finds his soulmate in a Main Street pawn shop, a storefront that operates today as an antiques store. The 2009 original's card-counting scene, meanwhile, was shot at the Riviera on the Strip, demolished in 2016, which leaves downtown holding something the Strip increasingly cannot offer: the actual buildings the history happened in.

Since 1995 the old casino row has lived under the Fremont Street Experience, a 1,500 foot LED canopy that turned the neon canyon into a light show. Vegas Vic still waves beneath it. The past, in Las Vegas fashion, was not preserved so much as given a bigger marquee.