A giant LED canopy blanketing Fremont Street was only one of many wild ideas proposed to revitalize downtown Las Vegas. The difference between it and many others, including a system of Venetian canals proposed by Steve Wynn, and life-size replicas of the Titanic and Starship Enterprise, is that the Fremont Street Experience ended up being built.
Whether a rooftop amusement park, the latest Fremont Street proposal, follows the canopy into reality is anyoneβs guess, but thatβs whatβs being proposed by the owner of the Neonopolis entertainment complex.
Rohit Joshi will officially announce his plans next week at the International Council of Shopping Centers Convention.
βWe donβt have to have malls anymore,β Joshi told KSNV-TV/Las Vegas. βMalls are getting outdated and I think this is the way downtown will grow.β
Neonopolis, a 250,000-square-foot shopping mall built around a city parking garage, lies just east of the canopy, so its height isnβt restricted by it. Opened in 2002, itβs the former home of Jillianβs restaurant and currently houses the Heart Attack Grill, Dickβs Last Resort, a Dennyβs, and 11 other tenants, including an axe-throwing range called Axehole.
Joshi, the businessman who led a development group that purchased Neonopolis from Prudential Real Estate for $25 million in 2006, told KXNV that his amusement park will cost about $300 million, but that each ride will be funded and operated by individual tenants.
He claims the park will boast two rollercoasters, a sky-diving simulator, and a zipline by the time it opens this fall.
Bemusement Park
This is where it seems relevant to point out that Neonopolis couldnβt be located any closer to the entrance to SlotZilla. Thatβs the 77-foot-high zipline that has zoomed riders halfway across the Fremont Street Experience since 2014.
In addition, the Strat, which is only two miles from Neonopolis, operates its own rooftop amusement park featuring four rides, including an 855-foot-tall sky-diving simulator.
Also working against Joshiβs dream is the name heβs proposed for it. He chose βMini Disni,β because he reasons that spelling it differently will deter the Mouse House from suing him for copyright infringement.
Joshi has a string of failed proposals in his past. They include the Silver Star movie studio, which placed the entire town board of Pahrump, Nev. in hot water with their constituents and cost the city manager his job, and a 900-acre housing, retail, and sports complex that never got built in Winter Springs, Fla.
Joshi proposed both of those projects in 1999.
