Las Vegas Strip

• 1. Introduction

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  The Las Vegas Strip runs for about 4.2 miles along Las Vegas Boulevard in Clark County, Nevada, and it is not technically part of Las Vegas at all. It sits in two unincorporated towns called Paradise and Winchester, just south of the city limits. Yet the Strip is what most people picture when they hear the name Las Vegas. It holds many of the largest hotel casino and resort properties in the world. Its skyline, its restaurants, its shows, and its casinos have made it one of the most visited tourist destinations on the planet. How did a stretch of desert highway outside a small city's borders become this? The answer begins with a dirt road, a handful of visionaries, a great deal of mob money, and a series of decisions that kept Las Vegas from ever being absorbed into the city it gave its name to.

• 2. Highway to Strip

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  Las Vegas Boulevard South was not always called that. For years it was known as Highway 91, or the Arrowhead Highway, or the Los Angeles Highway. The first casino built along that road appeared in 1931 as the Pair-o-Dice Club. A decade later, on the 3rd of April 1941, the El Rancho Vegas opened with 63 bungalow hotel rooms, becoming the first full-service casino-resort on what would become the Strip. It drew enough business to prompt a second nearby hotel, the Hotel Last Frontier, the following year. The name "Strip" itself came from a Los Angeles police officer and businessman named Guy McAfee, who named it after the Sunset Strip in Hollywood, his hometown. Then came Bugsy Siegel. Organized crime figures had been watching the gambling center grow, and Siegel funded the completion of the Flamingo using mob money. The casino opened in December 1946. The hotel portion followed in March 1947. Wilbur Clark's Desert Inn opened in 1950. Funding for many of these early projects flowed through the American National Insurance Company, based in Galveston, Texas, then known as a notorious gambling empire.

• 3. The Fight to Stay Unincorporated

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  In 1950, Mayor Ernie Cragin of Las Vegas tried to annex the Strip, which sat in unincorporated Clark County territory. His goal was to expand the city's tax base and pay down rising municipal debt. The casino operators fought back. Gus Greenbaum of the Flamingo led a group of executives to lobby Clark County commissioners instead. The result was the creation of two unincorporated towns: Paradise and Winchester. The Strip stayed outside city limits. More than two decades later, the Nevada Supreme Court struck down a 1975 state law that would have folded the Strip and other urban Clark County areas into Las Vegas. That legal outcome still shapes the Strip today. Clark County uses the phrase "Resort Corridor" to describe the full area. The Sahara marks the northern terminus by county definition, though travel guides typically extend the boundary north to the Strat, about 0.4 miles further. The Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign, built in 1959 exactly 4.5 miles outside the city limits, sits near the southern boundary.

• 4. Kirk Kerkorian's Imprint

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  Armenian American billionaire Kirk Kerkorian shaped the Strip more than almost any other single figure. He was the landlord when Caesars Palace was established in 1966. In 1969, he opened the International Hotel with 1,512 rooms, a scale that launched the era of mega-resorts. That property is known today as Westgate Las Vegas. In 1973, Kerkorian opened the first MGM Grand Hotel and Casino with 2,084 rooms. On the 21st of November 1980, an electrical fire at that MGM Grand killed 87 people in the worst resort fire in Las Vegas history. The hotel reopened eight months later. In 1986, Kerkorian sold it to Bally Manufacturing, and it was renamed Bally's. That same year, he founded MGM Resorts International to operate resorts across the city. Today, MGM Resorts International owns and operates several properties on the Strip, including the current MGM Grand, the Bellagio, New York-New York, Mandalay Bay, Luxor, Excalibur, Park MGM, the Cosmopolitan, and the CityCenter complex.

• 5. Mega-Resorts and Reinvention

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  The opening of The Mirage in 1989 marked a turning point. Smaller hotels and casinos began giving way to a new scale of resort entirely. Through the 1990s, more than twelve new hotels opened, including themed properties like the Luxor, the Excalibur, and Mandalay Bay. The Bellagio, built in that decade, was at the time the most expensive hotel in the world at $1.7 billion. In 1993, Cirque du Soleil launched the Mystère show at the new Treasure Island hotel, beginning the transformation of Strip entertainment into something far beyond lounge acts and card tables. Attempts to attract families had limited success. The trend through most of the 2000s moved in a different direction: toward the luxury end. The Venetian opened in 1999, Wynn in 2005, Palazzo in 2007, and Encore in 2008. CityCenter, announced in 2004 and built between 2006 and 2009, was a 66-acre, $8.5 billion multi-use project built on the former site of the Boardwalk hotel. Most of its elements opened in late 2009. The Sphere opened in September 2023, and the Fontainebleau Las Vegas opened in December 2023 on the site of the former El Rancho Hotel and Algiers Hotel.

• 6. What People Actually Do There

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  In 2019, about 81 percent of visitors to Las Vegas said they gambled, the highest share in five years. The average gambling budget that year was $591.06 per trip. About 89 percent of those who gambled did so on the Strip corridor. Big Strip casinos, defined as those with more than $72 million in annual gaming revenues, collectively took in more than $6 billion in annual gaming revenues in 2019, representing about 26 percent of their total revenues. The mix of games has shifted substantially since 1985. Blackjack dominated then, representing 77 percent of tables; by 2019 that share had dropped to 50 percent, and its revenue share fell from 50 percent to just 11 percent. Baccarat moved in the opposite direction: from 2 percent of tables and 13 percent of revenue in 1985 to 13 percent of tables and 37 percent of revenue in 2019. Sportsbooks have been expanding rapidly, with high-end facilities offering single-seat stadium-style seating, large screens, dedicated broadcast booths, and the ability to watch up to 15 sporting events simultaneously. ESPN broadcasts sports betting shows from a dedicated studio at The Linq. Beyond gambling, 51 percent of visitors in 2019 attended shows, with relatively more attending Broadway and production shows than in previous years. Celebrity residencies have drawn Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, Wayne Newton, and in more recent decades performers including Celine Dion, Lady Gaga, and Elton John.

• 7. Moving Around and What Gets Built

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  On an average day in 2019, about 50,000 pedestrians walked the Strip. In the 1990s, a series of footbridges went up over Las Vegas Boulevard to reduce pedestrian and traffic conflicts. The first was the Tropicana-Las Vegas Boulevard footbridge. Several now connect major properties across the boulevard, some built to mimic the themes of nearby resorts. The Las Vegas Monorail runs a 3.9-mile route on the east side of the Strip corridor, from Tropicana Avenue to Sahara Avenue, with stops every four to eight minutes. It began operating in 1995 with two trains originally from Walt Disney World. In 2020, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority acquired it. Free trams also run between properties on the west side. On the sustainability side, MGM built a solar array atop Mandalay Bay in 2014 and expanded it in 2016. Covering part of a 28-acre system, its more than 26,000 solar panels generate up to 8.3 megawatts DC, enough to power roughly 1,300 homes or about one quarter of the Mandalay Bay campus. The Strip has one of the highest concentrations of LEED-certified buildings in the world, including the Octavius Tower at Caesars Palace and the Linq Promenade, both certified LEED Silver. The Tropicana was demolished in October 2024 and will be replaced by a new Bally's Las Vegas resort and the New Las Vegas Stadium, future home of the Athletics when they relocate from their temporary home in Sacramento, with both set to open in 2028.