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.
