PHILADELPHIA When students from the University of Pennsylvania looked at blighted Fremont Street East in Las Vegas, they saw the outline of a swan rather than an ugly duckling.

And, in the contrast between Las Vegastowering casinos and down-and-out Fremont Street East, the international and interdisciplinary team from Penn Graduate School of Fine Arts saw the difference between what succeeds and what doesn't.

Beset by urban ills, Fremont Street could readily be written off, but the Penn students and their teachers  -- architect Susan Nigra Snyder, architectural and cultural historian George E. Thomas and artist Susana Jacobson -- focused not on the graffiti and crime (though there's plenty of both) but on the hot colors and streamlined details that suggest the potential of Retro Las Vegas.

At one time, the Fremont Street East-Boulder Highway corridor was the city's main street. To the west were the railroad station and the casinos; in the heart of the area were the principal department stores and shops, and to the east were motels and auto courts where bold neon signs vied with the casinos for attention.

Today, greater Las Vegas, with 1.6 million people, is the fastest growing city in the country, but, despite its size, it is relatively mono-dimensional because the tourist experience exemplified by the Strip and casino hotels dominates the city. Fremont Street East    is not on any tourist or even local map. But, as Penn's team has discovered, it has a rich physical infrastructure of classic early modern commercial properties, motels and neon signs evocative of an era that would be retro-chic in many other cities.

Working in tandem with a group of students from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas led by architecture professor Jose Gamez, Penn students from architecture, city planning, historic preservation, landscape architecture and fine arts are seeking ways to revitalize the area.

They propose to re-contextualize these buildings of the past so that they once again have meaning in a contemporary lifestyle. It's what Snyder and Thomas call "The Madonna Effect," the process of re-inventing an identity to fit in "with the times."

This project is a continuation of similar projects that Snyder and Thomas worked on with their late colleague Steve Izenour in three New Jersey locations: Atlantic City, the Wildwoods and Camden.