City of Las Vegas breaks ground for new park for Neon Museum

The Neon Museum is about to get a big boost from the City of Las Vegas.

From the La Vegas Sun:

Spread over two lots in downtown Las Vegas, gated behind chain-link fences, sit more than 150 pieces of vintage Vegas. The relics belong to the Neon Museum, which has been collecting old signs since 1996 and showcasing them throughout the city and at its Neon Boneyard.

But with no place to adequately display its vast collection, the Neon Museum for years has been forced to operate on an appointment-only basis.

That will change with construction of the Neon Boneyard Park, which gets under way on Monday.

The park will be located on the corner of McWilliams Avenue and Las Vegas Boulevard and will back up to what is now part of the Neon Boneyard. The project has been nearly five years in the making, Public Works Project Manager Gina Venglass said.

The $1.9 million improvement project will include development of the half-acre park and paving part of the Neon Boneyard for a parking lot. The Bureau of Land Management funding the project.

When the park is completed, Venglass said, visitors will find landscaping, benches, picnic tables, a stage and informational kiosks.

A sign made up of replicas of old neon letters will welcome visitors to the new park.

The company building the sign, Federal Heath, chose iconic letters from the old Horseshoe, Desert Inn, Caesars Palace and Golden Nugget signs to spell out the word “neon” in LED lighting.

“It’s not going to be a park that visitors drive across town to use. It’s really supposed to work hand-in-hand with the Neon Museum for visitors to use,” Venglass said.

The park will be located along the section of Las Vegas Boulevard that was recently designated a National Scenic Byway and is at the heart of the Las Vegas cultural corridor.

The corridor includes a concentration of the city’s cultural institutions such as the Las Vegas Natural History Museum, Lied Discovery Children’s Museum, the Old Las Vegas Mormon Fort State Historic Park and the Reed Whipple Cultural Center.

“I think it’s a great example of how supportive the city is of the Neon Museum project and the cultural development of the downtown area,” Neon Museum Director of Operations Danielle Kelly said.

Because the city is resurfacing parts of the Neon Boneyard and moving signs in the process, it gave the museum the opportunity to bring its signs to the future fully-functioning museum, Kelly said.

The Neon Boneyard will move across McWilliams Avenue, behind the restored La Concha Motel lobby, which will serve as the visitor center.

The change will allow the Neon Museum to better serve visitors, expand public hours and operate under a general admission format, rather than visitors making appointments for tours, Kelly said.

In light of the construction, the Boneyard is closed to the public temporarily but will reopen in the spring for modified tours. The new facility should be up and running by the summer.

“So many great things are happening down here in the cultural corridor and downtown. We hope that the park is part of that,” Kelly said. “It’s is all a part of continuing to put energy into this area for people in the whole community to get some here and get to know their museums.”

Fremont East, where's it going?

The Downtown Cocktail Room is the watering holes for those work downtown and those who live downtown.  Michael Cornthwaite and his fiancee, Jennifer Harrington, are doing their part to make Fremont East a viable part of the community.

Our buddy, Johnny Kats, caught up with them a few days ago:

To accurately gauge the viability of downtown Las Vegas, specifically the Fremont East entertainment district, watch Michael Cornthwaite. If he can't make it happen down there, everyone should beware.

The owner of Downtown Cocktail Room just off the corner of Fremont Street and Las Vegas Boulevard, Cornthwaite is pressing forward with plans to lure at least 20 boutiques, art galleries and various creatively fertile shops to the shuttered Fremont Medical Building on Sixth and Fremont streets. Set amid musty exam spaces, check-in and check-out counters, and a vaguely haunting X-ray room will be a collective known as Emergency Arts. This puzzle-piece project might be open as early as March 1 if Cornthwaite can fill the 20 spaces positioned snugly on the three-story building's bottom floor.

He's confident it will happen. As of this afternoon, Cornthwaite has secured 15 tenants, including a café at the entrance — where the medically needy once assembled is now where you might pick up a nice pastry. Cornthwaite and his fiancée, Jennifer Harrington, are partners in Emergency Arts with landowner El Cortez. They are giving themselves a year to "make it work" on Fremont East. If they fall short, well, Seattle's a nice city. So is San Francisco. It would be a shame for the city to lose these two downtown devotees and visionaries, but the clock is ticking. Even Harrington's own gallery, Henri & Odette, which once taking up residency nearby on Sixth and Carson, will move into the Emergency Arts project.

During our 30-minute interview Monday in the KUNV studios at Greenspun Hall on the UNLV campus, Cornthwaite talked at length about Emergency Arts, but also let opinions and thoughts on other Vegas-tied issues flow as freely as his shoulder-length hair:

• On working with El Cortez: "El Cortez is anchor of the entire (Fremont East) district. Their customer demographic is an older demographic, and frankly it is getting too old. It needs a younger demographic, and I think they're doing very well. El Cortez is the coolest hotel down there; the Cabana Suites are beautifully designed. ... It's a nice situation, and they are very supportive. ... When we had the (Las Vegas) Farmers Market (on Fremont Street), they supported that. They put flyers in the envelopes with the employees' paychecks, things like that."

• On the fate of the moribund 7-Eleven building on the corner of LV Boulevard and Fremont Street, a space that has been sitting unoccupied since the convenience store closed in 2006: "Since I started building (DCR), there have been two signed leases on that space, one of which was really never executed. The first, money was never collected and they just vanished, literally. ... But about a year and a half ago a group came in, showed a lot of interest, signed a lease and actually worked on the space. They demo-ed the adjacent space, so now we've got two spaces that are connected to each other for one, giant 5,700-square-foot space with a 36-foot ceiling inside. Unfortunately, they couldn't get their resources together, either. It was supposed to be like a live music venue, they were going to build a mezzanine level, but it was a fairly expensive project for the area, a $1-$2 million project. You know, they were about $300,000-$400,000 along, with no doubt they were going to be able get the money together. That was mid-2008, when everything started to fall apart. The Hive, is what it was called. It had lots of potential, and it could have worked out, but it's just been an unfortunate situation."

• On the fate of Neonopolis, which sits kitty-corner from DCR on the corner of Fremont and Las Vegas Boulevard: "Nobody has any doubt of the importance of Neonopolis in connecting Fremont Street Experience with Fremont East. That's the only way it could happen. But I take a little bit of a different approach in that scenario. I never wanted to connect the Fremont Street Experience with Fremont East. I wanted Fremont East to be locals-driven and have a locals-based clientele. I wanted a buffer between us and the Fremont Street Experience."

• On Rohit Joshi, who fronts Wirrulla Hayward, the development company that owns Neonopolis: "The gentleman involved in Neonopolis (Joshi) is a wonderful salesman. He has been to the club one time, and he has an amazing skill. I've had several meetings with him, and he has a very positive approach and he gets you feeling really good, and you walk out and you're feeling really good for about two minutes. Then you realize, something just happened but you don't know what it was, and of course nothing ever happens."

• On the proposed Star Trek Experience, which reportedly was on line to move into Neonopolis in May but has not actually moved in at all: "Nothing's going on. It's not going to happen. I would stake my bar on it."

• On CityCenter: "It's beautiful, it's an amazing architectural marvel. It's what I would love to see, what I miss in a vibrant city, and that's what we're trying to bring downtown, into the core of our city. I've heard them say that it's non-themed, but it's a city-themed casino. It's themed as a city. The really smart consumer won't buy into that. Who can afford to shop there? I'm not going to Tom Ford to buy a $650 shirt.

Thanks to Allen Sandquist for letting use his photo.