It doesn't take long to come to grips with
the physical layout of Las Vegas.
Downtown
, slightly southeast of the intersection of
I-15 and US-95, may stand at the center of
an urban sprawl that stretches fifteen miles
in all directions, but it's the legendary
Strip
, starting two miles south of downtown,
where the main action takes place. In fact,
by no coincidence at all, the Strip begins
at the point where Las Vegas Boulevard
leaves the city limits, and casino owners
are therefore not liable to city taxes.
The Strip itself consists of the
four miles of Las Vegas Boulevard between
the Sahara and Mandalay Bay ,
and thus now reaches as far south as
McCarran Airport. Almost every building
along the way is a casino, each frantically
clamoring for the attention of the tourists
who throng the road day and night. For the
sake of convenience, it's often loosely
divided into the South Strip , from Mandalay
Bay up to the MGM Grand and New
York-New York ; the Central Strip
, which includes Bellagio, Caesars Palace
and the Venetian ; and the North
Strip , from the Stardust to the Sahara
.
Whatever you might expect, downtown
Las Vegas is not a bustling area where
locals go about their business far from the
mayhem of the Strip. Instead, it too is
utterly dominated by casinos. Its
centerpiece, the Fremont Street
Experience , is an extraordinary
architectural conceit, in which four blocks
of its main thoroughfare have been roofed
over to give it the feel of a theme park
rather than a real city. An unfortunate side
effect has been to make the rest of downtown
seem even more derelict and menacing than
before; it is not an area any visitor should
attempt to explore.
In between the Strip and downtown lie two
somewhat seedy miles of gas stations,
fast-food drive-ins, and wedding chapels,
parts of which have been optimistically but
pointlessly promoted as the Gateway
District .
Being closely paralleled by both the I-15
interstate and the (currently inactive)
railroad line, the Strip also serves as the
dividing line between east and west Las
Vegas. The closest attempt to match the
success of the Strip has been along Paradise
Road , immediately to the east
and home to the Las Vegas Hilton ,
the Convention Center, the Hard Rock
, and several popular restaurants. A large
campus to the east of Paradise Road, between
Flamingo and Tropicana avenues, houses UNLV
- the University of Nevada Las Vegas - whose
students tend to hang out on Maryland
Parkway , another block east.
Although the area to the west of
the Strip is less susceptible to
generalization, the Rio and the Palms
have encouraged tourists to stray across to
the far side of the interstate, and Decatur
Boulevard , especially around Sahara
Avenue, is a thriving shopping district.
City residents, of course, can
distinguish between the demographic profiles
of any number of Las Vegas neighborhoods
, but tourists spend so little of their time
anywhere other than the Strip or downtown
that they can remain oblivious. Broadly
speaking, the northeast and northwest
quadrants of the city are its less affluent
areas, while its most fashionable district
is Henderson to the southwest -
ranked in its own right as one of America's
fastest-growing cities - with the new Summerlin
development to the east tipped as a future
rival.
