Lost Vegas

Before there was the Strip, there was Fremont Street. Decades ago, as the East Coast mobsters began transforming Las Vegas from a small-time oasis of vice into America’s capital city of sin, visiting gamblers and vacationers stayed in Fremont Street motels like the Para-Dice and the Blue Angel. Now, crowded from view by the billion-dollar pleasure domes just a mile away, eastern Fremont Street is an all-but-forgotten fragment of history in a town habitually hostile to the past.

There are no tourists at this end of Fremont. Instead, this weathered string of vintage motels, pawnshops and check-cashing outlets is home to an assortment of people who are as invisible to the city’s millions of visitors as is the street itself. Though police have stepped up patrols in the last couple of years, the area is still known as one of the most dangerous in downtown Vegas--a place crawling with feral losers in a city built on the idea that anyone can be a winner.

Amid the criminal types living there are a surprising number of ordinary families, optimistic immigrants and clean-living Christian evangelists. Some people wind up on Fremont Street at the end of their road, having nowhere else to go. For others it’s not a terminus but a place of transition: a gateway into America or a place to recover after a bad marriage, a lost job or bad decisions. People with histories of terrible hardship and bad behavior live next door to others whose tales are startlingly normal. Families from India run motels inhabited by prostitutes and job-hunting young couples, blue-collar workers and Bosnian refugees. Crackheads and alcoholics loiter on Sunday mornings in front of an African American church.

City developers have turned a couple of blocks at Fremont’s western end into a theme-park caricature of its former self, a frantically overlit string of nickel-slot casinos collectively dubbed “The Fremont Street Experience.” But on eastern Fremont, it’s dark at night--except for the modest neon signs of the surviving motels.