The first music and arts event scheduled after the Route 91 Harvest festival was Emerge, a multiple-day fest dedicated to emerging artists and tastemakers. Its founder, Rehan Choudhry, also founded the Life Is Beautiful festival in 2013, and before that was an integral part of the Cosmopolitan’s entertainment program. Today, he lives in New York—which is where he was when he woke to the news that a Las Vegas music festival had suffered the most devastating mass shooting in American history.
“My first reaction was just extreme fear and extreme terror, without having actually digested the scope of it,” Choudhry said. Then, as he sat there numbly watching the news, it occurred to him that if he hadn’t postponed his next Vegas visit by a couple of days, he would have been at Route 91, hanging out. “Then you start thinking of all your friends that were there,” he said.
It was two weeks before the shock began to wear off and Choudhry could give a thought to his own festival, set to debut a few weeks later. It was a natural decision to postpone, as other entities were already doing.
“We were all trying to figure out what the new world was going to look like,” Choudhry said, but he felt a slight hesitation, born of the last tragedy that nearly stopped an entire city in its tracks.
“Your natural response as an American, especially in light of what happened during 9/11 and everything we’ve seen since then, is ‘Nobody’s going to stop us from living our lives,’ right? That’s what’s ingrained in us; we’re a country of survivors. … But the problem with entertainment is, it’s a celebration.”
Privately, we wondered: Who would ever again want to attend an outdoor music festival? In the weeks and months after that terrible October day, a heartening answer to that question was revealed: Just about everyone.
“Festival attendance nationally has not gone down at all. In fact, quarter over quarter, attendance has increased since [October 1],” said Brad Weissberg, senior writer for music industry publication Venues Now.
Part of this may be because of the American resilience that Choudhry alluded to. Or it could be that new safety measures instituted at festivals—Weissberg says they vary in magnitude from one venue to the next, though most every venue has put them in force—are enough to assure reluctant concertgoers. But most likely, the answer is as plain as it appears: Why would we give up something that feels as good as live music?
For his own part, Choudhry found his solace in a Vegas Golden Knights game. “I’d always dreamed of seeing a sight like that … our entire community coming together,” he said. “Looking around and recognizing people in the seats … and everyone’s rooting for the same thing.”
Emerge eventually went on … and it’s going on next year, too.
“We’re going to continue to do events in Vegas,” Choudhry said. “My team’s still there; we’re coming back.”
Still no plans for the Route 91 site
What to do with the 15-acre festival site where the October 1 shooting took place is a sensitive subject.
Aside from the occasional bouquet of flowers, signs and other mementos left near its green-tarped, chain-link fence border, the Las Vegas Village grounds sit dormant.
Whether to continue events, erect a new facility or build a memorial on the land that once hosted the Route 91 Harvest festival, NBC’s “American Ninja Warrior,” the daytime Village at the iHeartRadio Music Festival, Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon and Helldorado Days is undecided.
MGM Resorts International, which owns the plot of land, was in talks with Metro to build a SWAT building on a portion of the land, but the company did not offer further details on the possible project or other plans.
County Commission Chairman Steve Sisolak said it’s too early to determine what plan of action would be best.
“You can’t ever forget about it, but now that we approach 1 October for the first time [since the shooting], it’s bringing back a lot of memories with everybody in the community,” Sisolak said. “I think we need to get through the first of October and then maybe start talking about the memorial and what they want to do with the site.”