The founding fathers of Las Vegas were railroaders, dam workers, mob bosses, and Mormon bankers. With a cast of characters this colorful, downtown was never going to be boring.
Little more than a century ago, Las Vegas was a railroad stopover between Salt Lake City and Los Angeles. When the rails reached Las Vegas in 1904, so did the Hotel Nevada (now the Golden Gate) at the corner of Fremont and Main Streets, which opened soon after. Gambling, booze, and loose women followed the railroad, and the hotel became the town’s gaming nerve center. Although gambling was outlawed for a time, it came back in full force in the 1930s, welcoming in a whole new set of players as Hoover Dam workers made it their recreational center. The rest, as they say, is history. Before the Las Vegas Strip came into existence, Downtown Las Vegas was the colorful heart of the valley with its own stories about Prohibition (let’s just say no one went thirsty); the rise of Mob control of the casinos; the Golden Age of the Rat Pack, and even had a literal front seat for the Atomic Era. Downtown Las Vegas has always kept its frontier attitude of freewheeling expansion and rules that were meant to be broken. While the neighborhood has had its ups and downs (once nicknamed “Glitter Gulch” during a period of neglect), its revitalization has been exciting to watch in recent years—and executed completely on its own terms. Big Business may have taken over the Strip, but mavericks and artists, family-owned businesses and free-spirited entrepreneurs rule downtown. You’ll see its individuality everywhere, from the mural-covered hotels to drive-thru wedding chapels, old-school restaurants and revived iconic neon signs.
Las Vegas is easy to navigate: I-15 runs north to south and passes straight through it, running parallel to Las Vegas Blvd. (the Las Vegas Strip). Downtown is just north of the Strip, and a 10- to 20-minute drive, depending on where you start. You can follow Las Vegas Blvd. north. Once you reach Carson Avenue, you’ve reached downtown.
If you don’t drive right from the Strip you can get there from the I-15, exiting onto 95 South and taking the exit marked “Downtown LV and Casino Center Blvd.” There are plenty of rideshares in operation here, so finding a ride is never hard. You can also hop on The Deuce, a double-decker transit bus that operates 24/7 from the Strip around downtown.
When you enter the Mob Museum, which is officially the National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement, you’re walking into the very same Federal Courthouse in which the famous Las Vegas portion of the Kefauver Hearings on Organized Crime took place in 1950. When it opened as a museum to the public in 2012, the descendants of both crime bosses and law enforcement met, having donated family memorabilia like ledgers and a Prohibition-era valise with hidden flasks. In fact, former Mayor Oscar Goodman, who was key in opening the museum and officiating the events, had been a mob defense attorney, representing Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal, Meyer Lansky, and Anthony “The Ant” Spilotro, among others. One of the most important artifacts is a bullet-ridden portion of a wall from the famous St. Valentine’s Day Massacre ordered by Al Capone in Chicago in 1929. This being Vegas, the museum has its own distillery, which makes its own moonshine. The Speakeasy, its underground interactive Prohibition exhibit, serves classic cocktails, some made with its own firewater.
A must-see is Atomic Liquors, on whose roof many people stood to watch the blasts from the Nevada Test Site in the 1950s. There are still Las Vegas locals who remember this form of recreation from their childhoods.
In the early 2000s, downtown created its Fremont East Entertainment District from the six blocks of Fremont that run east between Las Vegas Blvd. and 8th St. It has undergone lots of changes since those early years of the area’s revitalization, but still plays host to many of the neighborhood’s most interesting bars, cocktail lounges and restaurants. The Container Park, which is an open-air shopping mall fronted by a 40-foot-high, flame-shooting praying mantis (really!) is part of the district, as are rooftop bars, a speakeasy, and perfectly refurbished historic neon signs.
Downtown Las Vegas is permissive (see also: the costumes or lack thereof around the Fremont Street Experience), but it does have some rules. While you can drink on the street in Las Vegas, you can’t drink from glass bottles, and it’s illegal to drink from glass or cans on Fremont Street. Most bars and restaurants will serve you in a plastic cup suitable for your stroll.
Downtown went for a major splash when it connected a five-block section of Fremont by a canopy onto which ultra-high-definition light and videos shows are beamed. The Fremont Street Experience is a pedestrian-only zone lined with bars, several historic hotels like the Golden Gate, the Four Queens, and the Golden Nugget. Its canopy, Viva Vision, is 1,400 feet long and 90 feet high and explodes with songs and 3D effects. Sign up for the SlotZila Zip Line, where you’re the coin in a 12-story slot machine: Insert yourself and you’ll shoot across the entire length of the zone in a zipline harness over the crowds.
More than 250 signs from the 1930s to today line the grounds of the so-called Neon Boneyard in the outdoor area of the Neon Museum. The unrestored signs are stacked against each other and illuminated with lighting from the ground. You can come for a night tour in which a historian will tell you all about their origins and preservation. It’s the largest collection of neon in the world and includes historic treasures like the Stardust and Moulin Rouge signs. In its North Gallery, more than 40 non-operational signs have been relit, and there are 24 fully restored, illuminated signs. The visitors center, too, is famous: it is the historic lobby of the La Concha hotel, relocated here in recent years.
The 35-floor Circa Resort & Casino is a stunning sight rising from the lower downtown skyline. It is the first casino to have been built from the ground up in this neighborhood in four decades. The adults-only playground gives nods to mid-mod style and Rat Pack attitude, but it’s thoroughly contemporary. Its three stories of seats that face a 78-million-pixel screen create the largest sportsbook in the world. Stadium Swim, a complex of pools, lounges and cabanas that look toward a 40-foot screen is one of the most astounding pool scenes yet. Inside, look for the restored “Vegas Vickie” sign from the former Glitter Gulch hotel, which once stood on this property.
The very first hotel in Las Vegas, opened just a year or two after the Union Pacific Railroad reached the city, Golden Gate has seen it all. The historic casino hotel had the first telephone in Las Vegas (its phone number was “1”) and installed the first electric sign. It weathered gambling and the outlawing and return of gambling, Prohibition, and every other major and minor era in this town. Its lobby has its own stories.During later renovation projects, workers pulled Prohibition-era whiskey bottles from the walls, which you can see with old ledgers and vintage chips and racks from this era.
The Golden Nugget was built in 1946 and is one of the best updated hotels downtown. It’s also a hotel that is frequently renovating, so guests get contemporary quality in downtown prices (read: significantly lower prices than Strip hotels). Its famous feature is a 200,000-gallon shark tank. Not only can you watch the predators from a cabana or a pool chair, but you can also swim through them—or at least feel like you are when you zoom down the pool’s three-story flume that goes right through it all.
El Cortez Hotel and Casino, the longest continuously running hotel in Las Vegas, was once owned by mobsters Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky. The renovated hotel is perfectly situated in the Fremont East District, and in a nod to its own wild history, serves mob-themed sandwiches and burgers at its Siegel’s 1941 restaurant. The Downtown Grand is a great rethink of the hotel that was once the Lady Luck and has a rooftop pool retreat. The Plaza Hotel sits just west of the Fremont Street Experience, the former Union Plaza Hotel for the now defunct railway. Its creative owners have modernized it in fun ways, adding pickleball courts and a steakhouse named after former mayor and Mob defender Oscar Goodman. The man himself sometimes holds court here, telling wise guy stories, martini in hand, to a crowd of appreciative listeners.
The hotels in Downtown Las Vegas are generally more gently priced than those on the Strip, so they’re great for bargain hunters who don’t love the sticker shock of Las Vegas Blvd. History buffs will love downtown, where hotels and attractions are all manageable walks from each other. Some of the city’s most interesting restaurants and bars are here, and you’ll find once you leave the Strip you’ll be paying a fraction of the price for food. Understand that downtown took on its “Glitter Gulch” moniker for a reason. Not all of the area has been sanitized, and its grittiness keeps things interesting. To that end, staying in this area sometimes requires a sense of humor. Mavericks, eccentrics, artists, and those who love them will fit right in.
