Breaking Exclusive: Fremont St Zipline Opens Friday

A couple hours ago on Gadling.Com, I broke a pretty fun one: By this Friday, the folks behind the Bootleg Canyon Flightlines attraction in Boulder City are slated to open a zipline that launches into the Fremont Street Experience from the plaza to the east of it with all that cool restored neon.

The Fremont Street Flightline is expected to go about 800 feet to the center of the Fremont Street Experience outside of the Four Queens and right by the main performance stage. See where Greenheart LLC owner Ian Green is standing by the pink X above to your right? That's where the landing platform is planned to stand.

If you look carefully at the top photo, you'll see the folks in the foreground with a tape measure, mapping out the location of the tower from which riders will leap from 60 feet and swing down to 14 feet up. Folks will buy their tickets ($15 from 2-6 pm, $20 from 6 pm to midnight) at an office on the ground level (the former office for condos at Streamline, in fact) and then ascend to the top floor of the FSE parking garage to get to the launch pad.

Greenheart LLC is spending $150,000 on a temporary four-line system that will hurtle folks a relatively genteel 20-25 mph over the FSE crowds and under the canopy. Yes, you'll be able to fly during the light show itself, although they're planning to time rider launches so that you go over Fourth Street when traffic is stopped at that light as a safety precaution.

If it goes well, Greenheart and FSE will go before the Las Vegas City Council for approval for a permanent attraction that they hope will span the entire length of FSE and land roughly in front of the Plaza Hotel. They got a 90-day temporary permit on Monday, just in time to get the thing up and running for Green's big Halloween idea -- a broom-racing championship. After that, he's looking at outfitting the lines with reindeers and such depending on the time of year.

Could be a lot of fun and definitely could bring a new crowd to downtown. My biggest concern is that the price is way too low and will result in very, very long lines. That will discourage people on the Strip from coming down. I wonder if some sort of a number or reservation or appointment system might not bring people down there and then set them loose in the casinos and such until it's their time.

I reminded Fremont president Jeff Victor that his folks contend that hula-hooping on the plaza is hazardous and distracting to tourists and could cripple old people and want that dastardly deed outlawed. I'll play his prickly response to that on Saturday's episode of "The Strip."

Unlike the Boulder City attraction, where the attendants are willing to shoot your photos and such for free, Cashman Photo will be shooting pictures of riders on the line and selling them at their kiosks. Green hopes the visibility will spur more interest in the Boulder City attraction which is, by the by, awesome. Here was my YouTube video from my day out there with my friend Trevor:

Next up, they hope: the long-discussed zipline at Excalibur. Hear on this coming weekend's episode of "The Strip" where Green might go, too.

[h/t to Sparky of LV.]

A Zipline for...Excalibur?

I didn't want this to get buried in the other post about the Bootleg Canyon Flightlines, but during my interview with Ryan Geene, the manager of the attraction, he revealed that Greenheart LLC, which owns it is in negotiations with Excalibur to build one there, too.

They two sides are in early negotiations, but one issue, Geene acknowledged, is that they still want tourists to want to come to Boulder City to ride that system. Here's what he told me:

"We’re trying to see if we do one line, a teaser line, so you fly out and when you get off there’s a kiosk where you can sign up to go do the real deal out in Bootleg Canyon. ... But it would have to be exciting, too. If it's just a slow line, it’s no fun, why would you want to do a boring thing? So it would have to be exciting and leave you wanting more."

Geene said they're scoping out places to erect the steel cables, maybe "somewhere above the drawbridge where you walk in so you’re flying over everybody as they’re walking in."

He also said they're talking to the Hualapai Indian tribe in northwest Arizona. They're the ones who built the Grand Canyon Skywalk and they're always looking for new things to build to give tourists more to do. Also, because the Hualapai aren't beholden to the environmental regulations on their portion of the Grand Canyon that the US Parks Service are, there's more opportunity to create a zipline across some portion of the big hole. That said, it doesn't strike me that ziplines are all that harsh on the environment but I doubt the U.S. government would permit it given that they reject most everything else including the Skywalk.

Anyhow, more of these things are coming.

From The Files of: BLOW ME

It's not that Vegas is beyond reproach. God knows I've got my share of complaints. Informed complaints. Hell, I'm responsible for a cover headline in this week's Las Vegas Weekly explaining why it's not so much fun to live here anymore.

But.

Nothing gets my goat quite like the Asshole Parachuting Columnist. And today's Asshole Parachuting Columnist is...Neil Steinberg of the Chicago Sun-Times. It seems poor Neil was forced (at gunpoint?) by his sons to include a Vegas stop as part of a summer family road trip. The kids wanted to see the Hoover Dam, so they passed through for a night.

What follows in a piece forebodingly -- and predictably -- titled "What Happens in Vegas: Little Good" is the standard-issue litany of indictments against Vegas. He opens with an allegory between Vegas and Hell which, gosh, I'd never thought of before. Then we learn he chose to stay at the low-rent Excalibur not because he's a cheap bastard but, he claims, because those evidently gunned-up children of his were enamored of the medeival castle motif. (These are the same smart kids who rerouted the trip because they wanted to see the Hoover Dam but they can't be entertained by Paris or Venice? Or would that just not make a very good column for the stingy old man?)

Steinberg drones on about the timeshare hawkers and then burnishes his metro-liberal bona fides by expressing his bafflement over the pleasure people derive from gambling. Is this really that hard to fathom, or is Steinberg just playing smug elitist for effect? People like to play games and they like them even more when they can win something, which some people do. Either way, how is the thrill of it any different than, say, paying to spend a day on amusement park rides? Your money's (probably) gone either way. But nobody ever sneers at the poor souls who choose that as their entertainment even though I can't personally fathom why flying down a precarious metal track at top speed would appeal to anyone.

The Asshole Parachuting Columnist, incidentally, always ignores facts that screw up the narrative. In this case, Steinberg cites lots of statistics that suit his purposes but either willfully or out of ignorance fails to note the part where 60 percent of revenue for the resorts these days is not from gambling but all the other neat stuff that people used to go to Chicago for, too. You know, the fine dining, the shopping, the shows, the rides, the spas, the animal attractions.

How does anyone judge Vegas without standing in front of the Bellagio Fountains for a performance or three? Could Steinberg be bothered to spring for admission to Shark Reef? Listen to gondoliers while lapping up a gelato from Illy? Watch former Olympians from around the globe perform death-defying acts in custom-built theaters replete with technology that makes the Hoover Dam seem like Lincoln Logs? Observe the awe-inspiring cluster of towers soon to open at CityCenter which, however economically unwise it was to build, were designed by the world's greatest architects?

Fuck, no. He stayed at a bottom-of-the-market resort, lost some money at a blackjack table, got offended by commercialism and cigarette smoke, and got the hell out of, well, Hell with the snarky conclusion that, yup, the place is as pathetic and disgusting as he remembered from 15 years ago.

Now, I love Chicago. Got my journalism degree there, fell in love for the first time there, saw some amazing theater and art and ate countless wonderful meals there. But Mr. Steinberg, can you imagine if I judged Chicago by the one night I spent a few years back at the bullet-riddled crackhouse-in-training Skylark Motel on Archer? What if I declared all of Chicago worthless and disgusting without ever checking out Grant Park, the Lincoln Park Zoo, Navy Pier, Gino's East, the Lakefront, the Palmer House, Wrigleyville, Greektown, Watertower, Ann Sather by the Belmont el and whatever they're calling the Sears Tower these days?

As a columnist, nobody expects you to be fair, Mr. Steinberg. But, columnist to columnist, I generally find people take my views more seriously when I at least pretend to be informed. Those timeshare folks? Totally obnoxious. No argument there. But not quite as obnoxious as rendering a verdict on an entire destination or city based on as little information as you collected and presented in this essay. What's worse, I wonder why you bothered to even stop in. You knew exactly what you were going to write at least as far back as Jean.

The Strip is LIVE tonight w/Charo

You think she's just a blond, air-headed, surgically enhanced... oh, wait. That's last week's show. This week, we've got Charo. And while many people think the same things about her, the giggly, jiggly Spanish singer and guitarist happens to also be a highly respected musician and performer who in the early 1970s was making as much as Sinatra for shows on the Strip. So, with her return to Vegas as a headliner at the Riviera, we chat her up about plastic surgery, her affection for RuPaul and where her signature “cuchi cuchi” line came from.

Plus, behind the scenes of a bizarre poker interview and other news from Vegas.

Join us at 7 p.m. PT at LVRocks.Com for the live steam, chat room and studio cam. Or wait for the podcast version and subscribe (it's free!) via this iTunes link or via this Zune link. Your call.

Silence on Dead Baby At Excalibur

Catching up on the local papers that accumulated while I was in Florida, I was stunned to find a shocking little story buried inside the local section of the R-J several days ago.

Hotel workers at Excalibur found a dead newborn boy -- placenta and umbilical cord intact -- in the trash in a public bathroom. The corpse was wrapped in a pillowcase and stuffed in an Excalibur gift bag.

The baby was found on Mother's Day, May 11. The news seems to have broken about it on Monday evening on the Las Vegas Sun's website with this piece. There was that short, obligatory piece in the Review-Journal the next day. The Associated Press picked up the tale, too, giving it a little more attention.

And that's it. Nobody in the local media has followed up since even though, according to the AP story, "police say their best hope may be the public."

I'm not sure why this bothers me so much. It just seems like a bigger deal than has been made of it, especially considering I've lived in cities where abandoned baby corpses have become front-page news for days. Here's one in perhaps the most popular tourist corridor in the world, and nobody seems to much care.