Fremont Street Experience and the Neon Museum - A Little Bit About a Lot of Things A Little Bit About a Lot of Things

March 12, 2014 Fremont Street Experience and the Neon Museum

The neon museum is about 15 minute ride from the strip, it will be about a $30 cab ride. We had a rental car, and there was free parking right next door. The Neon Museum visitors’ center is located inside the historic La Concha Motel lobby. The shell-shaped building was designed by architect Paul Revere Williams.

Tours are offered 7 days a week, both day and night time tours are available. We paid a little extra to do the night tour, $25 per adult (day tours are $18). The La Concha sign you see is a restored original.

Lots of the Vegas signs you will see say 1905, which is when Vegas was founded. The signs have been donated to the museum from the sign company.

The signs are lit up at night, but they don’t work, it costs a great deal of money to restore these signs.

They are moving these signs around all the time, so you could come back a year later and different ones could be showcased.

We had a really great tour guide. Note that you are not allowed to record the tour and you are allowed one camera per person.

The La Concha restored sign.

How cute is this guy? It used to be located on the other side of the boneyard, but the residents of the apartment complex next door kept throwing rocks at him, so they had to move him to the far side.

The Moulin Rouge sign. They do a lot of wedding photography sessions here, so they changed the sign around so that is says “in love”. Love it! The Neon museum isn’t in the best part of town, so it’s best not to go wandering around the neighborhood after the tour. The museum will call you a cab should you need to get back to the strip.

Later this week we headed over to Fremont Street to see some of the great restored signs. This is old Vegas, a little seedy, a little sketchy. Every hour the canopy lights up for a show. There are also multiple stages where performances are going on.

Here you can get a photo with a transformer or a show girl – it’s great people watching, that’s for sure. We stayed for about 30 minutes, that’s all we needed.

Some interesting facts about Fremont Street: Fremont Street has been the site of numerous “firsts” in Las Vegas: the first street to be paved (1925); the first traffic light; the first elevator (the Apache Hotel in 1932); and the first high-rise (the Fremont Hotel in 1956). When gaming was legalized in 1931, the first Nevada gaming license was issued to the Northern Club at 15 E. Fremont Street. Meanwhile, the Horseshoe was the first casino to install carpeting while the Golden Nugget was the first structure designed from the ground up to be a casino.