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.