Living Las Vegas

Real Life in the Shadow of the Strip

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Top Vegas Hotels: Bellagio, Luxor, Rio

Roads from the Ashes: An Odyssey in Real Life on the Virtual Frontier, by Megan Edwards

Off-Strip Attractions

Sin City Fast Track: The New Las Vegas Monorail

We’ve been waiting for years, and now at last the Las Vegas Monorail is actually carrying passengers. I decided to wait a few more days after the grand opening to take my own maiden voyage. If there were kinks, I figured, they might have been camouflaged on the days the press was snooping around. I [...]

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Watching All the Girls Go By

Gentlemen’s Clubs. I know they’re full of naked ladies, but the name suggests that fully-clothed ladies might not be welcome. That’s why, until last Thursday night, I’d never darkened the door of one of the establishments that are proliferating so quickly all over the Las Vegas Valley.
Last week, while I was attending a conference here [...]

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Ten Miles (and Ten Light Years) Away

Is this really Las Vegas? People are picnicking on a huge green lawn shaded by oak trees and cottonwoods. There’s a cool breeze, even though it’s almost the Fourth of July. The sandstone ranch house looks like a movie set, and the red rock mountains look like New Mexico. Well, it isn’t really Las Vegas, at least not yet. Las Vegas is creeping closer, but one ridgeline still separates the burgeoning metropolis from Spring Mountain Ranch…

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New Dazzle on Fremont Street

I’ve never known Fremont Street without its “Experience.” The canopy has shaded three blocks of Fremont for nearly ten years, and I’ve lived here less than five.
“Oh, it was different before,” old-timers have told me. “Grittier, dustier. We miss it.”
I can’t miss what I’ve never known, but I can easily imagine grittier and dustier. For [...]

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Baptism by Beer - and Elvis

It’s official now, so raise a toast—er—prost—to the new Las Vegas Hofbräuhaus. It’s been open since January, but the grand opening was last night. About a thousand invited guests gathered to watch a ceremonial keg get tapped, listen to oompah bands, and sample a groaning board of wurst, dumplings, and sauerkraut. Oh, yeah, and drink [...]

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