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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.
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.
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.
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Being closely paralleled by both the I-15 interstate and the 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.
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