Downtown Vegas Property Owner Proposes Rooftop Amusement Park

Posted on: May 16, 2024, 10:37h. 

Last updated on: May 16, 2024, 10:49h.

Corey Levitan Read More
Expertise: Commercial Gaming, Entertainment, Expert Insight, Las Vegas, Las Vegas Myths.

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.

This rendering comes from a video produced to promote a rooftop amusement park proposed by the owner of downtown’s Neonopolis. (Image: KSNV-TV/Las Vegas).

Whether a rooftop amusement park, the latest Fremont Street proposal, follows the canopy into reality is anyone’s guess, but that’s what’s 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.

“We don’t have to have malls anymore,” Joshi told KSNV-TV/Las Vegas. “Malls are getting outdated and I think this is the way downtown will grow.”

Neonopolis, a 250,000-square-foot shopping mall built around a city parking garage, lies just east of the canopy, so its height isn’t restricted by it. Opened in 2002, it’s the former home of Jillian’s restaurant and currently houses the Heart Attack Grill, Dick’s Last Resort, a Denny’s, 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.

This rooftop view of Neonopolis demonstrates how close the SlotZilla zipline would be to the proposed amusement park site. (Image: Google Earth)

Bemusement Park

This is where it seems relevant to point out that Neonopolis couldn’t be located any closer to the entrance to SlotZilla. That’s 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 Joshi’s dream is the name he’s proposed for it. He chose “Mini Disni,” 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.