What stays in Vegas: Why Sparks Street won't get a zipline
Kelly Egan, Ottawa Citizen
Published on: July 30, 2014, Last Updated: July 31, 2014 4:28 PM EDT
I hate airports and dread flying, which makes me the house drip at vacation time.
But, miraculously, my wife and son managed to drag me to Las Vegas for a few days in July, only because they make a pill for everything.
The gambling part, I actually like. I’m just no good at it, which explains how $200 disappeared at a blackjack table in 45 minutes. My God, her dealing hands moved fast. But enough of my sad slideshow.
Downtown Vegas has something we want. It is not loads of booze, all-night everything, bare anything, and sidewalks of broken dreams.
No, Fremont Street in Las Vegas has a zipline, right over its pedestrian mall.
Oh, to be gliding on Slotzilla, 77 feet off the ground!
Some think this is exactly what the Sparks Street Mall needs, as was pitched in early 2013.
Slotzilla (its actual name) is shaped like a giant slot machine and, from a great height, has four parallel cables along which crazy people, right after happy hour, are zipped along for 850 feet, often screaming.
It looks like loads of fun. But, here’s the problem: A lot of things look like loads of fun in Las Vegas, where the hotels are pyramids, the malls have gondolas and everybody’s half-gassed at 11 a.m.
Vegas is a city where you lose your inhibitions. Ottawa is a city where you grow them, hiding them under layers of fleece and CSA-approved helmets.
We were watching the zipliners when a commotion erupted behind us. There was a guy dressed only in construction boots, a hard hat and one of those bathing suits that floss as you move. Nothing else. This was not Tunney’s Pasture.
Lots of people were having their photo taken with him, for a wee stipend. “One of the Village People?” was my best guess as to what the act was all about, as we had just been approached by Mr. T and a mute ancient Egyptian.
They call it the Fremont Street “Experience,” which is appropriate, as they sell walk-along beer in a plastic cup for $5, put dancing girls on the bar tops, and fill the place with kooks.
See, Vegas makes this work. It’s how they get their freak on. We have the Mike Duffy and Claude Giroux “Experience” and, sometimes, Ribfest. Not really the same. Ottawa, seriously, is a place where speed bumps for bicycles make the news.
Interestingly, they’ve covered about 1,500 feet of their pedestrian mall with a high-arch canopy of some kind, as high as 90 feet off the ground. It gives the pedestrian mall an indoor-outdoor feel, and provides shade against the 105-degree heat during the day while holding a massive LED screen, apparently the world’s largest.
It’s curved, like a second sky, and succeeds in creating a party atmosphere.
Would the whole thing work in Ottawa?
First of all, the zipline actually comes with a fair whack of infrastructure. There is a large base that needs elevators and various towers to hold the cables up. Would Public Works, the city of Ottawa and the National Capital Commission ever agree to such a thing?
Let’s think for a minute. OK, never.
Where would the millions come from? Let’s think for a minute. OK, nowhere.
In fact, here is an email from an official at Flightlinez, the company approached to have a peek at the mall project.
“We have shelved the zipline in Ottawa for now as our company has taken on a couple of offshore projects and we are busy delivering on those,” writes Alex Hessami.
See. Even the people who make ziplines have SHELVED our zipline!
Nor can we forget the climate. Ottawa has six months of goofy weather and, sometimes, Julys when people wear hoodies and stay inside and sulk. How would a zipline work in February, unless it was pitched as some kind of circumpolar Winterlude Ironman?
Vegas, and maybe this is the problem, is not a city, but an invention. Like any good one, it steals everything, like the Eiffel Tower, the Chrysler building or Caesar. It even has a giant ferris wheel, with enclosed cars, called the High Roller, which is just like London’s Eye.
Except you can have bar service and — it made the Vegas newspaper — people are hanky-pankying to amazing heights in the night sky. Bad tourists.
So many ideas, so little mall. But rest easy, city slumbering without zipline: There’s only 46 days until the opening of Parliament!
To contact Kelly Egan, please call 613-726-5896 or email
kegan@ottawacitizen.com
Twitter.com/kellyegancolumn
http://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-...-get-a-zipline
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