LOST VEGAS

It’s 6 am Sunday morning and the sun’s radiance is biblical. A woman carrying two 12-packs of Miller stands matter-of-factly for my camera. I wonder where she’s going with 24 beers and the sun barely up on a Sunday. But this is not out of the ordinary for Fremont Street, the original tourist strip in the world’s greatest tourist city. In the early 2000’s, Fremont Street was a mostly forgotten piece of history in a town chronically hostile to its past, where landmarks are more often imploded than preserved. Crowded from view by the billion-dollar pleasure domes on the Strip a mile away, the motels on Fremont Street teemed with wrenching pathos, eye-popping weirdness, and unexpected contentment.

Decades ago, the quintessentially 1950’s-style neon signs of the El Cortez, the Pair-a-Dice, the Desert Moon and other motels beckoned vacationers and gamblers. Now, the motels sheltered a strange mixture of drug dealers, crack whores, born again Christians, and outcasts of all sorts – along with a surprising number of ordinary families. These are people who, like Fremont Street, have been largely forgotten, falling from sight amid Las Vegas’ unprecedented boom years – in much the same way that the poor and marginal have fallen from sight everywhere in America.