Editor's Note, February 18: Megan Fazio of DTP Companies issued the following statement this morning: "Since Tony’s passing in November, the estate is grateful to have received an immense amount of interest in finding ways to expand on Tony’s vision in revitalizing downtown Las Vegas through community efforts. As Las Vegas begins to overcome the economic interruption caused by the pandemic, and with the favorable policy of opportunity zone enjoyed by Downtown Las Vegas, the time is ripe for the estate to consider all options to further implement Tony’s vision.

"As part of this effort, the estate has been advised that all potential transactions of its real estate holdings must be filed with the court first. Since there will be many possibilities, the estate has chosen to file all of its real estate holdings at this time and invite all the interested parties to articulate how they may contribute to the expansion of Tony’s vision."

 

Ten years ago, local Fremont occupied less than a block. The Fremont East Entertainment District—the area east of the Fremont Street Experience pedestrian mall—consisted of just a handful of locals-focused, nongaming businesses: the Beat coffeehouse, Beauty Bar, Don’t Tell Mama, Downtown Cocktail Room, Emergency Arts and the Griffin, plus a now-gone pizzeria, kebab joint and other non-entertainment spots including a dollar store and a check-cashing place. There were also several empty storefronts; the north side of the street was little but iron gates, boarded windows and graffiti-tagged façades.

What happened next is already a part of Vegas legend. Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh, who had relocated his online shoe retailer from San Francisco to Henderson in 2004, took an intense interest in Fremont East and the rest of Las Vegas’ city core, buying up roughly 45 acres’ worth of property there and eventually relocating Zappos once again, from Henderson to Vegas’ former City Hall building. Heading up an entity known as the Downtown Project, Hsieh invested more than $350 million into Fremont East, developing local-friendly businesses, medium- and-high-density housing, a car-sharing service, a preschool and the Life Is Beautiful music and arts festival, among other civic amenities. More than anything, Hsieh wanted to create a pedestrian-hospitable community—to turn Downtown into a sort of extended campus, where a San Francisco-like startup culture could bloom.

The tech scene never quite took root, but the core of the city was nonetheless transformed. Today, businesses and residences line multiple blocks of Fremont Street, far past that initial, late-aughts grouping of bars and galleries. Several blocks away, the Arts District is developing into a strong dining, entertainment and retail destination in its own right, and while Hsieh’s investment there was minimal, Main Street has undoubtedly benefited from the magnet Fremont East became. Even Circa, the first new casino built on Fremont Street in four decades, arguably owes a debt to Hsieh’s consequential city-building efforts.

It’s tempting to imagine what might be happening in and around Fremont East right now had 2020 not happened. But in March of last year, COVID-19 shut down Fremont’s bars and restaurants for weeks, and when they reopened, they were limited to a fraction of their usual door-busting crowds. Then, in late November, the unthinkable happened: Tony Hsieh died at the age of 46.

The loss struck an already-reeling Fremont East hard. Two months on, the pain remains fresh. Tributes to Hsieh are everywhere: on the vintage motel signs DTP Companies (the Downtown Project’s current name) helped the City to restore; on Inspire Theater’s LED billboard at Las Vegas Boulevard and Fremont; and painted onto a giant utility box facing DTP’s Downtown Container Park dining, entertainment and retail center. More than that, though, you can feel the heaviness resting on top of local Fremont when you walk around the neighborhood.

Container Park, formerly bustling, is a ghost town of paused and outright closed businesses. The nighttime crowds that used to pack the bars are comparatively small and subdued. And, here and there, the tagging is beginning to return. While none of this can be directly attributed to the absence of Hsieh’s leadership—he’d already pulled back from day-to-day operations of both Zappos and DTP Companies at the time of his passing—the sadness feels like it’s entwined with the rest of what’s going on, an additional weight atop everything else.

“Losing a friend always affects you,” says Natalie Young, owner and proprietor of beloved Downtown brunch spot Eat. “I’ve lost quite a few people in the last six months, and they were people that I didn’t expect to lose. It’s heartbreaking, but you know, Tony wouldn’t want us to sit around and cry. He’d want us to keep working, keep striving for our dreams—to keep helping each other and pushing to make things amazing and beautiful.”

The Downtown development company Hsieh founded is still pushing forward, though it’s not quite ready to say exactly how. (In an email statement, DTP Companies representative Megan Fazio writes, “The Hsieh Family has committed to seeing Tony’s vision through. There are several projects on the horizon for DTP Companies, and we’re happy to update [the Weekly] after the estate is settled and as more information becomes available.”) In the meantime, Fremont-area businesses are pivoting to serve customers in ways they could never have predicted a year ago.

“Prior to the original [COVID-19 lockdown], we only saw online sales here and there,” says Scott Seeley, co-proprietor of the Writer’s Block Book Shop. “Then, when everyone was shut down, it became overwhelming just trying to keep up with online sales, which we were so grateful for. And now that we’re open again, online sales are still a pretty steady source of revenue for us that didn’t exist prior to the shutdowns. … I think that people discovered that there are alternatives to Amazon, and that if they want us to exist beyond this, that they need to support us and other small businesses any way they can.”

The Writer’s Block has significant skin in the game. A few years ago, it moved out of its original Fremont Street space—and from beneath the DTP Companies umbrella—into a new, much larger space at Sixth Street and Bonneville Avenue. It increased its inventory nearly sixfold, added a small café and dramatically augmented the educational and entertainment offerings in its events space, moving beyond book clubs, author readings and school field trips into live music and spoken-word events. So when it hit, the virus didn’t just chill the in-person business; it squashed a budding community.

“It felt a little desolate” upon reopening, Seeley says. “People were coming in, but in small amounts—and with the masks and everything, it just didn’t feel quite as vibrant. … You don’t have the kind of warmth of people in little groups, joking around and laughing. But it’s gotten better.”

Other area businesses haven’t been as fortunate on the rebound. During a recent visit to Container Park, I stopped by JoJo’s Jerky, one of the center’s founding businesses. A week later, when I called to speak to owner Hans Hippert, he was in the process of breaking the store down, moving its inventory to his other location at Jones Boulevard and Desert Inn Road.

“It’s very, very hard to do this, but we didn’t have customers coming in. It fell off all at once and never recovered,” Hippert says. “And Tony’s death just hit the soul of the city really hard.”

Nevertheless, Hippert remains a devoted fan of Downtown. “I love it,” he says. “My wife and I still support the businesses down here. Whenever we get a chance to go out on date night, we’ll go down to Le Thai, to Circa. … [Closing this location] is really unfortunate. It wasn’t my ideal situation.”

Even Natalie Young’s Eat, a runaway success from the early years of the Fremont East boom, is a survival-minded operation these days. “We just get in line and do what we need to do to stay relevant and stay open,” Young says. “I just take it one day at a time. … I’m sitting in my new furniture store [Authentik] down on Commerce Street right now, and I’m optimistic about today. I’ll just try to do something amazing today. And, hopefully, it’ll have some results tomorrow.”

Perhaps fittingly, one of Hsieh’s final projects perfectly embodies both the city-as-campus idea and DTP Companies’ willingness to incubate small businesses. Fergusons Downtown, a former motel converted into a courtyard of restaurants, boutique businesses and much-needed Downtown green space, has the feel of a town square even with COVID-19 restrictions in place. An employee at the front gate counts everyone in and out, keeping occupancy at state-mandated levels. Inside the courtyard, people casually browse through the shops, sit on the grass with their Mothership coffees and allow their leashed dogs to socialize with one another.

On the way out, you can stop by Vegas Test Kitchen, a takeaway restaurant concept by SecretBurger.com founder Jolene Manina, which features several unique pop-ups at once; the Gather House, a collection of artist and maker spaces located within the former Writer’s Block location; and nearby stalwarts 11th Street Records, Atomic Liquors and PublicUs. Fergusons offers the kind of bright, positive experience that makes you believe there could be something good waiting on the other side of all this suffering and stress.

Fergusons’ co-founder and creative strategist Jen Taler says her crew has been working hard to make everything feel light and carefree within that U-shaped courtyard.

“Like any [business] during a global pandemic, we’re just trying to figure out how to be sustainable … while creating new revenue streams, because, obviously, revenue is affected,” Taler says. “We’re trying to be smart and creative while maintaining who we are, which for Fergusons is being a service to our community.”

And Las Vegas is responding to that mission, Taler says relievedly. “I’m beyond grateful for the community that’s showed up, [because it’s] intentional. … We have over 50% that walk out with something that we can visibly see. The people coming Downtown to Fergusons and this city block are here to support, explore and engage with what we have to offer. That means the world to our tenants, to the vendors that pop up and to the staff. I don’t think I could ask for more.”

The year ahead is impossible to predict, for Downtown, for the Fremont East corridor and for Las Vegas as a whole. We’re a hospitality town through and through; the pandemic’s chilling effect on our ability to provide it, to visitors and to each other, has not only damaged our city’s economy, but also its sense of self-worth. In terms of things returning to the way they were before COVID-19, the Strip will head that direction in a sprint, because it has to; it’ll pick up whatever pieces still remain and make them work. The Fremont East Tony Hsieh helped to build will take a bit more finessing, a bit more of a considered touch. After all, it’s about building something outside of—yet still adjacent to—the Vegas tourists know. But whenever DTP Companies and other developers are ready to move again, they’ll have strong bones to build on, just as Jen Taler is doing with Fergusons today.

“I’m fortunate and beyond for Tony to have believed in me,” Taler says. “I feel like we shared a lot of values—bringing people together, and leading with passion and an open heart.”