Energized? Signs aren’t here yet

What a difference a day can make. The night before, the city had a big opening celebration with music and Mayor Oscar Goodman present for the lighting of two 40-foot-high neon signs mounted three blocks apart on Fremont Street. The signs proclaim the “Fremont East District.”

If that name is rather confusing the goal is not. This area has received a $5.5-million spruce-up meant to inaugurate a new entertainment district that a city press release proclaims is “an effort to attract additional non-gaming nightclubs, cocktail lounges, and entertainment hotspots to the area.” So in addition to neon there are wider sidewalks.

But by the next night, a late August Saturday, the new entertainment district seemed mostly returned to its usual state of blight. I was approached by a beggar and watched an apparent drug deal go down but saw no other obvious entertainment. This was despite how very crowded Fremont Street Experience, the tourist attraction the city says had 18.7 million visitors last year, was on just the other side of the street.

A few people waited for one bar to open (it was almost 10 p.m.), and a few people headed into another one. Maybe traffic will pick up on this side of the street a little by the end of the year, when Club V, a sign proclaims, is set to open in what is now a closed building. But more storefronts on the three blocks are for rent than open.

The one thing that really stands out in the entertainment district between the two signs isn’t new at all; it is one of the oldest landmarks in Las Vegas: the El Cortez casino. The new entertainment district looks more like an attempt to link the relative prosperity of Fremont Street Experience tourist vibe to the El Cortez casino.

For the El Cortez, by far the largest business placed between the two 40-foot neon signs, this attempt to create a “non-gaming” entertainment district could be a boon to its gaming. Outside of the El Cortez there is still plenty of room for entrepreneurs to put actual entertainment in the entertainment district. As in so many things in Vegas we have the icing -- and are waiting for a cake.

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A union leader celebrates labor

Now, for a Labor Day report.

According to Secretary-Treasurer D. Taylor, the head of Nevada’s largest and most powerful union, Culinary 226, these are still good times for labor in Las Vegas. “Jobs like housekeeper and jobs in the kitchen are in heavy demand. There are jobs available,” Taylor says.

Except for the Venetian, every casino on the Strip is unionized by Culinary 226. The Culinary represents about 53,000 maids, kitchen help, bartenders and cocktail servers up and down the Strip, and jobs that may pay minimum wage elsewhere are still well compensated in Vegas.

“A maid in Vegas starts at around $13.75 an hour with full benefits: health and welfare without premiums, a pension and a guaranteed workweek,” Taylor notes, adding that the union is also looking to continue to expand within Vegas. In the next five years there will be as many new rooms built on the Strip as there were in the last 15, he points out, and those should create union jobs. Taylor attributes the success of the Culinary Union to its ability to partner and adapt with the resorts. So jobs in the hipster nightclubs and in the restaurants overseen by celebrity chefs are all union. “We have partners. We recognize that it makes no sense to bring strict union rules to nightclubs. For one thing, they are only open three days a week.”

The most important partnership between the union and resorts is a job training academy that currently trains 3,000 people a year for resort jobs and is now in the midst of expanding. “We need to take that to 6,000,” Taylor says.

The easiest entry level-union job in Vegas is busing tables, Taylor says. The most coveted and lucrative jobs remain the ones for which customers tip. Las Vegas is famous for being a great place to visit, but for many service jobs this town remains, as it has for decades, the best place to work.

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Sarah Silverman, one of the family

Comic Sarah Silverman usually comes here not to work but to see her boyfriend’s family.

“My Vegas experience is different. I remember I went to Jimmy [Kimmel]’s Uncle Frank’s 70th birthday. Jimmy is the one with great Vegas stories. He remembers being in the kids’ section of the mall and watching Sammy Davis Jr. try on suits.”

But Silverman is in town to do her stand-up at the Mirage tonight. “These will be my first shows in a while, because I’ve been working on my television show. . . . I have a bunch of friends coming in for the shows, and it should be a blast.” This will be her first traditional headlining gig in Vegas, though she has played the House of Blues at Mandalay Bay and appeared at a comedy benefit here. She’ll be studying the scene. As she says, “I haven’t worked Vegas enough to have a theory about the audience yet.”

For more of what’s happening on and off the Strip, see latimes.com/movablebuffet.