UP ON THE ROOF: Commonwealth is a good spot to grab a drink and look out onto Vegas’ new downtown. (Anthony Mair)
Las Vegas has been on one hell of a ride these past few years. Known for fun, it suddenly became also known as the country’s foreclosure capital, the biggest of all the Sun Belt sob stories, a tragic mess where even the most stable neighborhoods suffered big-time. When things went kaboom, there were approximately 2 million people in the city. Few of them had any reason to smile.
So why, of all times and of all places, is the city’s downtown looking — and feeling — better than ever? Why is a handsome new Art Deco performing arts center, the $470 million Smith Center, standing in the middle of a parking field that will eventually, it is still hoped, become one of the largest mixed-use developments in the country? Why is there a sparkly new, LEED Silver-certified City Hall just across the railroad tracks? Speaking of, what about that nifty LEED Gold bus terminal on Bonneville Street? Or the wild, Frank Gehry-designed Cleveland Clinic complex? Why have so many hotels on Fremont Street been recently renovated — even the tiny Golden Gate, the city’s oldest?
Every city’s got to grow up sometime. Now well past its 100th birthday, why not Las Vegas? What was already one of the most unique downtowns in the country is, slowly but surely, becoming a city center again, aided by piles of public and private money pouring into the neighborhood to fuel a storefront-by-storefront, casino-by-casino, block-by-block transformation.
The cash has been put to good use. Come down on a Friday afternoon to the old bus depot on Casino Center Boulevard. Here, in the shadow of the new $42 million Mob Museum (the “National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement”), you will find the neighborhood’s weekly farmers’ market. Just steps from the back door of the Binion’s casino that once housed the World Series of Poker, local housewives buy fresh vegetables and fruit and smoothies and coffee and granola, swapping gossip and parsnip recipes while live music plays in the background.
Nearby, the finally properly up-and-running Neon Museum offers guided tours of its immense selection of vintage signage. Or maybe you just want to hit the Vegas Streats food-truck festival, an every-other-Saturday street party that unfolds in front of the better-than-ever El Cortez, one of the city’s most historic casinos. Around the corner, on the part of Fremont Street not covered in a canopy of lights, you can eat a civilized bowl of Thai eggplant at the counter inside the Pok Pok-ish Le Thai. Or sit down for a proper cocktail or craft beer up on the rooftop at Commonwealth — where a DJ wearing a Joy Division shirt spins tunes from the steampunk-y booth, and hipsters and party girls and old people and everyone in-between dances and has a good time.
Across the street, maybe someone is doing a poetry reading in the Beat Coffeehouse, a ’90s-esque cafe that also does a brisk vinyl trade (tucked in here is the tiny Burlesque Hall of Fame). From here, you can wander elsewhere in what’s known as the Emergency Arts building, through small galleries displaying the often fascinating work of local artists. Late at night, drunk revelers and cabdrivers alike crowd into the brightly lit Kabob Korner to fuel up; across the street, the world’s largest gay nightclub, Krave Massive, promises it will be open within a few months.
Meanwhile, just over on Carson Street — past the under-construction container park that’s about to become the Vegas version of Brooklyn’s gone-too-soon Dekalb Market — a little breakfast and lunch joint, Eat, sits unobtrusively in the downstairs of a shady-looking apartment building. The pleasant restaurant’s well-sourced Southern-inspired fare is lapped up by the local power crowd, including the likes of Tony Hsieh, the Zappos CEO whose Downtown Partnership organization has helped speed up many of the changes you’re seeing at street level and will do much more. This year, Zappos will move its headquarters into the old City Hall, right by the Mob Museum, and Hsieh and partners have committed $350 million to revitalizing downtown.
Sure, the grit is still here: the seediness, the transient population that doesn’t seem all that transient, the frightening little hotels and the off-brand strip clubs. But things feel different now, as if anything is possible. If the past few years are any guide, it probably is.
Learn more about the ongoing transformation of downtown Las Vegas at downtownproject.com.