Old habits die hard: Downtown Las Vegas

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Las Vegas, especially to outsiders, is a city that embodies the get-rich-quick ideals of the American dream, and this year this most American of cities will host a Formula One race for the first time since 1982. But over the last 40 years since the last race was held there, Las Vegas has become two separate entities – at opposite ends of the famed Las Vegas Boulevard.

From its infancy until the mid-20th century, the only Vegas was downtown Vegas. Downtown Vegas at the northern end of Las Vegas Boulevard was where gambling began and the Las Vegas myths were made. In fact downtown is Las Vegas. The Strip, where the Formula One cars will be racing, is actually outside the city limits.

But, soon after the end of the 1960s, the old city centre known as “Glitter Gulch” lost the glamour battle with the newer Strip – the four-mile stretch at the southern end of Las Vegas Boulevard, with its massive resorts, Egyptian pyramids and dancing fountains. Downtown became the seedy place; somewhere to lose your money, albeit more slowly, on the two-dollar blackjack tables and nickel slot machines. Where working-class America came to let its hair down. Gone were the days of Rat Pack glamour.

Downtown Vegas was constructed by colourful chancers and legendary mobsters lured across the desert to try their luck at building fortunes, mainly through gambling, resulting in casinos like the Golden Nugget, Binions and the Four Queens. But the old downtown “street of dreams” has for a long time struggled against its new big brash brother. The Strip was built by latter-day entrepreneurs, most of whom made their fortunes building property empires. The Las Vegas known as the Strip more resembles Dubai than the romantic American myth that we’ve held on to in our imaginations.

As you walk through the glitzy but anodyne corporate landscape of huge glass-fronted hotel skyscrapers and designer shopping malls that beckon you away from the street and into acres of hotel lobbies filled with singing, blinking gambling machines, you soon come to the Stratosphere tower that marks the beginning of the old downtown Vegas.

Here the city starts to open up into big skies and empty lots with large intersections marked by 7-Elevens and cheap liquor stores. The buildings become more colourful and are low-rise tattoo parlours, adult stores, bars, wedding chapels and cheap motels with neon-lit signs, and some that simply say “Strippers” or “Fun City”. One sign for a bar proudly proclaims: “Getting Vegas drunk since 1962.”

A lot of the downtown area is rundown and neglected; populated at times with the left-behind of society hanging around intersections looking for shade or simply walking. At times it feels like you are being directed to the derelict and burnt-out building that the American Dream conjures up in Hunter S Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

But for all of its downbeat feel, downtown has so much going for it compared with the sterile Strip; especially as you walk up towards the vibrant Fremont Street area, where life is not lived in hotel lobbies and shopping malls but out on the streets. Up here it’s a messy but uplifting collection of all types that come together – locals, weekend revellers, families, budget holidaymakers, newlyweds, hustlers, bohemians and street performers.

Here Vegas is still hanging on to its old “Americana” charm. What draws you to this part of Las Vegas as much as the old neon signs, palm trees and the colourful casino frontages washing the pavements in vibrant colour, is the street life: musicians Donnie Can Rap and Ross Floss; newlyweds Alexis and Traye from Philadelphia on their honeymoon; Will and his girlfriend pushing their worldly possessions on a trolley down Main St; Ashley, Nick, Jeez and Lee – tattooed from head to toe – going off to a Blink 182 gig.

Then there’s the obligatory Elvis impersonators, Chewbacca and Chucky beckoning passersby; bizarre acts try to catch your eye; half-naked go-go dancers dance on top of bars as families walk past; newlyweds in full wedding garb lost in their romantic moments; men lighting up bongs to smoke their (legalised) cannabis with. The weather-beaten and the young freaking out to some tribute band.

All of it against the backdrop of neon-lit late-night bars, tattoo parlours, wedding chapels, pawn shops and those famous old casinos where smoking is still allowed.