New Fremont Street Experience President Named, Here’s What He’s Up Against
It’s a new day for Fremont Street Experience with the naming of a new president and CEO of the organization overseeing the lively downtown destination.
We know the guy. We know him so well, we know he’s not even pissed we didn’t mention his name in the first paragraph and we aren’t giving his name in this one either, just to build some suspense.
Cliff Atkinson. He is so much more than a sentence fragment or stuffed shirt. He’s the perfect guy to do an impossible job. Here’s who he is and what he’s up against from the perspective of someone who worked with at least two Fremont Street Experience presidents. Hold onto something, this isn’t your typical superficial, cut-and-paste story. Looking at you, Las Vegas Review-Journal.
Cliff Atkinson has spent his professional career in hospitality, hotel management and the casino business, “gaming” if you’re fancy.
Something something “senior leadership positions with MGM Resorts International…president and COO of Luxor Hotel and Casino…Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group in San Francisco, New York and Las Vegas” something something.
Decades of experience at elite hotels and casinos, that’s all fine and good, of course, but things don’t get interesting until Fontainebleau.
Perhaps you’ve heard of it.
Cliff Atkinson was named president of Fontainebleau Las Vegas on February 1, 2022.
There, Cliff Atkinson found himself up to his chin in a certified shitshow.
A toxic culture led to the exodus, voluntary and otherwise, of pretty much every top executive at the resort, either before it opened or soon thereafter.
Atkinson was caught in the crossfire, emphasis on “fire.” He was let go in the most awkward way possible. In Jan. 2023, Fontainebleau announced a new President & CEO (Brett Mufson) despite already having one, Cliff Atkinson. That was some unmitigated, classless dipshittery right there, all due respect to dips and shits.
Fontainebleau opened December 13, 2023, but Atkinson was not at the helm. He never went public with what happened, but it came down to head-butting with Fontainebleau’s ownership and world-class meddler Peter Arnell. Arnell was reportedly pivotal in Fontainebleau’s near-implosion before parting ways with the brand in 2024, a story never reported in any other publication.
Fast forward to July 2023, when we broke the news Atkinson would become president of Virgin Las Vegas, effective July 31, 2023.
Atkinson had vision. He had the business chops. He endured the mouth-breathing leadership at the Culinary Union for months during a contentious labor dispute. He got the casino back from Mohegan Sun, overcoming a huge obstacle for the resort. He did a lot, and there was more to come.
Once again, Cliff Atkinson was thrown under the bus, summarily terminated and tossed to the curb. Which is, miraculously, not a mixed metaphor.
All that behind him, Atkinson is set to take the reins of Fremont Street Experience, one of the weirdest entities in all of Las Vegas.
Why is it weird? It’s a marketing organization that also does maintenance and security for Fremont Street (the part under the giant Viva Vision screen), and it also has a parking garage, which operates as its own business, and it also has a zipline attraction, SlotZilla, that pays for everything else.
We are exhausted just writing that, so imagine what Atkinson faces.
Perhaps the weirdest part of Fremont Street Experience is its board is made up of the casino owners and operators who are members of the Fremont Street Experience. That’s right. They are competitors working together. There are a lot of personalities involved, and often competing priorities.
Everyone makes nice in public, but there’s some longtime friction among these Alpha males.
Mostly, the casino owners and operators agree: They all want more bodies downtown. They often disagree about how best to achieve that goal.
Oh, we almost forgot that not all downtown casinos are members. Plaza, El Cortez and Downtown Grand aren’t in the Fremont Street Experience. Again, weird. Strat is technically downtown, too, also not a member.
Another odd aspect of Fremont Street Experience, which comes into play when disagreements arise, is how the “shares” work. Certain casinos have more shares, some have less. Those are essentially votes when push comes to shove.
Four Queens and Binion’s owner Terry Caudill has two full shares. Golden Gate (owned by Derek and Greg Stevens) has a half share, because of its size, presumably. Golden Nugget has one, Fremont has one, The D (also owned by the Stevens) has one share.
The Cal and Main Street don’t have shares, they’re sort of grandfathered in under Fremont (all owned by Boyd Gaming). The big twist: Circa doesn’t have a share. Shares were depleted before Circa opened. That means Derek Stevens, owner of three casinos on Fremont including the $1.2 billion Circa resort, has 1.5 shares, fewer than the owner of Binion’s and Four Queens.
Please take a moment to clean up your keyboard following the explosion of your head.
Anyway, all this has led to ample drama, and it’s ongoing.
The past three presidents of Fremont Street Experience have been a mixed bag of talents and foibles.
Jeff Victor, who made the SlotZilla zipline a reality, which dramatically changed the financial landscape of FSE (prior to its existence, the casinos paid into FSE’s coffers, that practice ended years ago), was let go for no good reason. The drama: Derek Stevens scooped him up and Victor has been his V.P. of Operations for several years. Nothing to see here!
Victor was followed by Patrick Hughes, who was pivotal in bringing about a massive and expensive upgrade of the Viva Vision canopy. Hughes was responsible for significant debacles like a zombie attraction, Fear the Walking Dead, and a million-dollar “sitcom” about Fremont Street Experience, “The Downtown Vegas Reality Show,” that will never see the light of day due to (wait for it) drama. Hughes left FSE during COVID (drama), as did we (no drama, we were furloughed and never went back because Vital Vegas became part of Casino.org and lived happily ever after).
Andrew Simon was the most recent president of FSE, and while his tenure wasn’t filled with big ideas, it also avoided drama, which was no mean feat. You may have seen Simon on “Undercover Boss.”
Cliff Atkinson is joining the FSE team at a very interesting time. The personalities are nowhere near as scary as the current Las Vegas landscape, including a drop in visitation.
As The Strip goes, so goes Fremont Street and Fremont Street Experience.
Fremont Street Experience casinos thrive when The Strip thrives. Downtown has a small fraction of the rooms The Strip has. Dips on The Strip ripple downtown.
Connected to that is SlotZilla, FSE’s golden goose. The zipline is more than a decade old, which presents unique challenges. It has been massively successful, but numbers have dropped and chances are everyone at FSE is going to look to Atkinson to reverse that trend.
At some point, everyone who’s riding SlotZilla has ridden it. It’s a little like the High Roller observation wheel at Linq. You have to do it, but you don’t necessarily do it again.
Most of the people who ride SlotZilla (about 70%) come downtown specifically to do so. Fewer riders, fewer visitors to the casinos.
SlotZilla has been featured in any number of film and TV productions, including this show where we may or may not have ugly cried.
Another challenge: It’s nearly impossible to get buy-outs for Fremont Street from big companies because they visit Fremont, see a “KiCK mEe iN tHe nUts, $20” sign and bolt. Such events can bring $1 million a pop to Fremont Street Experience. Attempts to clean up the street are met with blowback from the ACLU. Unlike private venues (Linq Promenade, The Park near T-Mobile), Fremont Street is a public street, which means there’s very little quality control and palm frond weavers are expressing their First Amendment rights. Don’t get us started. Oh, and we are aware the “KiCK mEe iN tHe nUts, $20” guy died. RIP.
That said, there’s very good news for Fremont Street Experience, too. That good news is a lot of people are mad at prices on The Strip right now. The narrative Las Vegas is “pricing people out” is rampant in the media, including overseas. The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) is doing an abysmal job of countering that story, which actually benefits FSE. That’s because FSE is perceived as a great value compared to The Strip, and in many cases that perception is reality.
While downtown isn’t “cheap,” per se, and Strip fees and charges have made their way downtown, it’s still significantly less expensive. Not the drinks on Fremont Street, but the rooms and restaurants and bars.
Oh, and there’s free entertainment on three stages every night of the week. Anything free perks up ears.
There’s even a free new concert series, the Neon City Festival (counter-programming for the disastrous F1 Las Vegas Grand Prix), in addition to FSE’s popular summer concert series.
Downtown used to boast slots looser than The Strip, but that’s no longer the case. They still feel looser, and that’s what really counts.
Cliff Atkinson has the perfect sensibility for what’s next at Fremont Street Experience. He can do the boring administrative tasks, but also listens to input and knows good ideas when he sees them. (Trying to bring back Center Bar at Virgin wasn’t his finest moment, but at least he was doing something.)
So, now you know more about Fremont Street Experience than 100% of local journalists, despite it being one of the most popular tourist destinations in the country.
Despite its almost unbearable volume (a lot of that falls on the influence of Derek Stevens, who believes there’s no such thing as too loud), Fremont Street Experience remains the best place in the world to party and gamble and drink and people-watch. You can walk from one end of FSE to the other in five minutes, and the vibe (circus) is electric.
The buskers and tweakers and vagrants just add to the bedazzlement, and the percentage of drunk women French kissing is higher than anywhere else in the world.
The Viva Vision screen, recently trademarked as The Canopy for some reason, continues to be one of the best free attractions anywhere. Since the canopy renovation, it can now be viewed during the day (something FSE has never really exploited).
The screen’s main production, “MIXology,” is a wonder to behold, despite the fact “Sweet Caroline” was tacked on to create the world’s biggest cringe nightly. Atkinson might want to Google “ASCAP” once he unpacks his boxes, by the way.
As a former staffer at FSE, and now a member of the “media,” we interact often with FSE and its member casinos, and we can honestly say the hiring of Cliff Atkinson is a relief.
We never got the impression Andrew Simon stuck around much after hours. You can’t do that job unless you’re around at night; that’s when the circus happens. Casino execs are largely MIA after 6:00 p.m., except for Derek Stevens and his crew, the president of FSE can’t be.
We can’t wait to see what the next chapter holds for Fremont Street Experience, especially if that includes dealing with the forgettable social marketing since we left. We blew up the FSE Facebook page from 70,000 to 700,000, but that momentum fell off a cliff after we left.
See what we did there? We have faith in you, Cliff, don’t blow it. No pressure.
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