There are a lot of things that are fun about visiting downtown Las Vegas. The history of the old casinos and Las Vegas has brought people to the area for years. The growing access to affordable, unique independent bars and restaurants all around downtown Las Vegas is beginning to bring new visitors to the area. One of the most controversial attractions in downtown Las Vegas are the street performers at the Fremont Street Experience.
Some people love entertainment the street performers or buskers provide, some hate being harassed for tips by the street performers and some don’t care if the street performers are around as long as they don’t get in the way of going from Point A to Point B.
Today marks a new day on how we see street performers at the Fremont Street Experience. In the past the performers could come and go as they wish. This sometimes would impede traffic walking around on Fremont Street. This will no longer be the case as street performers can no longer set up shop whenever and wherever they want to. New rules have gone into effect which will regulate when and where street performers can do business at the Fremont Street Experience.
Street performers are now restricted to 38 specific 6 foot round performance zones at the Fremont Street Experience. They are only perform between 3 p.m. and 1 a.m. The performers are now spread farther apart from each other to improve traffic flow. Performers will not be closer than 40 feet from each other and won’t be within 100 feet of the concert stages on Fremont Street.
The performers won’t stay in the same place all day. They will rotate performance zone every two hours. In order for a performer to get access to one of these performance zones they have to register with the city and then opt in to a lottery system for each day they want to perform. So far it seems as though all performers who entered the lottery have received some time in the performance zones.
The extra effort to gain access to performance zone is already weeding out some performers who would rather not deal with the restrictions. The goal of the zoning of street performers is to create some kind of organization to how and where the buskers will performer at the Fremont Street Experience.
Time will tell how well the new performance zones will work. Initial impressions seem to be positive from a visitor point of view. There’s less congestion and a little more structure to when, where and how many street performers are at the Fremont Street Experience. Some performers have a different opinion as they all seemed to enjoy the freedom to set up and entertain wherever they wanted in the past. Expect your next visit to the Fremont Street Experience to be a little different than the last time you were there.
