Downtown Las Vegas has gone to the dogs, because it’s home to the 15-foot-tall canine bathroom – also known as The Big Fire Hydrant. Standing proudly outside the pooch park on Fremont Street, this bright yellow beacon of hope is fully functional and able to spurt out water at the pull of a lever.
Sensible and practical it may be, but the story behind The Big Fire Hydrant is absolutely bonkers.
Back in 2013, the owners of upscale doggy daycare centre The Hydrant Club were looking to stand out amongst the glitz and glamour of sin city. Enter venture capitalist and all-round oddball Tony Hsieh. He suggested building a Fire Hydrant of epic proportions, and had the connections to make it happen.
Building Bigs was, apparently, Tony’s modus operandi. He also installed a massive metal mantis just up the road to promote a local restaurant precinct.
“The idea is every block or so have something interesting,” Tony told an enraptured journalist. “We’re building the world’s largest functioning fire hydrant next to the dog park, building all sorts of things. And the idea is to get people to walk one more block, because Vegas has been a very car-focused town.”
Tony, sadly, never got to enjoy the fruits of his labour. He descended into madness shortly after the completion of his magnum opus, squirrelling himself away in his house to suck on cans of nitrous oxide and starve himself of both food and oxygen for the fun of it. I guess the pressure of topping The Big Fire Hydrant was just too much for him.
He also took to smearing poo all over the walls, with close friend Jewel – yes, that Jewel! – describing the inside of his home as “Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory”.
Ewwwwww!
The lunacy came to a chaotic crescendo in November 2020 when Tony, high on goofballs, set fire to his backyard shed and then locked himself inside. He didn’t survive, and the world was robbed of a true Big Thing visionary.
Golly gosh, if only Tony had built some sort of enormous water-spurting contraption outside his house – teehee!
Come On Baby, Light My Fire Hydrant
The years following the Fire Hydrant’s inauguration were good ones for Las Vegas’s dogs (and their humans). They had space to play, a place to do their business, and lots of pet-friendly cafes in which to enjoy a frothy puppaccino.
Then terror descended upon this peaceful corner of Las Vegas. Ruffians took up residence in Fremont Streets, and things would never be the same again.
“The kinds of threats that really lead me to the decision that this neighborhood was no longer a safe place for a standalone small business were things like gun violence,” The Hydrant Club’s owner Owner Cathy Brooks told an appalled journalist. “Things like large groups of unruly individuals.”
“When 100 guys drinking tall cans, getting hammered and getting stoned, are riding bikes right down the middle of the street,” Cath continued. “Then they throw their bikes all over your property and you ask them really politely, ‘Hey would you mind moving over so you are not obstructing the business’ and I get called all manner of names… What am I going to do?”
To make things more tragic, the bikes in question, shockingly, weren’t even big. They were just regular bikes. Faced with unimaginable brutality, the owners of The Hydrant Club shut the doors and never returned.
“Two hours after the last dog left the building, two people were shot about two blocks away,” Cathy wept.
The Big Fire Hydrant, once a symbol of downtown Vegas’s bright future, lay abandoned. It’ll take more than a few maniacs to stop Bigella and moi from admiring a giant working fire hydrant, however.
But our trip to The Big Fire Hydrant very nearly cost us our lives.
How I Wet Your Brother
Shortly after arriving at The Big Fire Hydrant, a tribe of bad boys in sequinned leather jackets rode up on a three-person tandem bicycle and started mincing around in front of us. Bad intentions danced in their eyes. This crew had run the owners of The Hydrant Club out of town, and now they’d come back to finish the job.
When one of them tossed an empty can of beer at the base of the Hydrant, I decided things had gone far enough.
“Boys, I should warn you,” I snapped, rolling up the sleeves on my custom-printed Land of the Bigs tunic. “I get pretty dang mad when people don’t show respect to The Big Fire Hydrant. And you wouldn’t like me when I’m mad.”
“Pffft,” snarled the lead thug, shaking his mohawked head. “You call that a big fire hydrant? It’s not even the largest in the continental USA.”
“Yeah, there’s a 24-foot working fire hydrant in Beaumont, Texas that is far more impressive,” added another tough guy as he swung a metal chain around.
“And that one’s painted like a Dalmatian, if I’m not mistaken,” claimed a third delinquent, who had a skull painted on his face and peg-leg. “I feel it adds a kitschy ambiance that is most welcome.”
Bigella had heard enough of their bigotry. She stepped up to The Big Fire Hydrant, then paused for dramatic effect.
“You boys still look a bit wet behind the ears,” she boomed, reaching for the fireplug’s oversized handle. “Say ‘hy-drant’ to my little friend!” Then, with a flick of her wrist, she released a torrent of icy water upon the goons, giving them a jolly good soaking.
“Wow, Bigella, you’ve really made a splash around here!” I chuckled.
The trio of punks huddled together like drowned rats. The leader stepped towards us, sopping cap in hand, shoulders slumped.
“We’ve learned a good lesson today,” he lisped, wringing out his crop top. “Maybe it’s time for us to give up on crime and violence, and turn our attention to something valuable – like preaching the gospel of America’s incredible Big Things.”
The five of us, different people from different worlds, came together for a group hug in the middle of Fremont Street. Tony would’ve wanted it that way.
And that, my friends, is how Bigs Bardot and Bigella Fernandez Hernandez solved Las Vegas’s gang problem.
