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Downtown Las Vegas is defined as that part of town north of Charleston Boulevard, east of I-15 and
south of Washington Avenue. This is the “original” Las Vegas as seen in films from the 1960s. It is the location of such classic hotel/casinos as Bunion’s Horseshoe, the Golden Nugget and the Four Queens.
In Downtown you’ll find Souvenir shops, railway station, post office, administration buil- dings, City Hall, Courthouse, Marriage License Bureau.
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It’s
also the home of the landmark neon characters Vegas Vic and Vegas Vicki, and the exciting new Fremont Street Experience, which has transformed four city blocks into a wonderland of 2.1 million light bulbs and a pulsating 540,000-watt sound system with shows from dusk to midnight.
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The Strip
The Strip
began when an enterprising hotel man from California, Tom Hull, realized the traffic on a lonely stretch of two-lane highway leading to Los Angeles could lead to his own tourism gold mine. At this time, the buzzing center of Las Vegas was three miles to the north in what is today Downtown. Hull purchased the land and opened up the El Rancho in 1941. The El Rancho was a Western-themed hotel that surprisingly thrived in this barren location. Other entrepreneurs followed Hull’s lead and opened up other Western-themed hotel/casinos in the 1940s. It wasn’t until the notorious gangster Benjamin “Bugsy Siegel” came to town that the “cowboy joint” concept was superseded by a new style; when the Flamingo opened in 1946. Bugsy`s extravagant style was imitated by several other hotels that opened in the 1950s including the Desert Inn, the Sahara, the Stardust and the Riviera.
Another building boom changed the city forever with the introduction of megaresorts in the `80s and `90s.
Circus Circus had begun the theme concept in 1972 and was followed up by the Mirage,the Excalibur, Luxor, Treasure Island, MGM Grand, New York-New York and continued on with the recent openings of Bellagio, Mandaly Bay, The Venetian, Paris Las Vegas and the Aladdin .
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