LAS VEGAS — WHAT happens in Vegas mostly doesn't happen in Vegas.
Only half of the 41 million annual visitors to Sin City ever set foot inside the Las Vegas city limits and fewer than 10% ever rent a hotel room in the incorporated city of Las Vegas, which extends from the gritty downtown south to Sahara Boulevard. Every major Strip casino-resort resides outside the city limits -- most of them in the unincorporated township known as, yes, Paradise.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Sunday December 31, 2006 Home Edition Travel Part L Page 3 Features Desk 0 inches; 21 words Type of Material: Correction
Las Vegas -- A Dec. 3 Travel section story on downtown Las Vegas mentioned the Elvis-a-Rama attraction. The museum has closed.
Downtown, the official Las Vegas, looms in the minds of most tourists as a run-down, honky-tonk of a city. Yet, the more I see of it, the more I like it. Doing downtown Vegas is the best way to avoid the Manhattan-scaled traffic jams, the velvet-rope apartheid, the hyper-corporate hustle, the human and economic crush that a visit to the Strip has come to include. The New Vegas, dominated by just two or three conglomerates, has converted the old Rat Pack hangouts into behemoths that now wring more of their profits from room, restaurant and club rates than from the slot machines and tables.
What a deal, then, to check in to a room at the venerable downtown Binion's, where the walk from the parking valet to the registration desk was about 10 yards -- with no waiting in line when I got there. I had splurged by reserving an $83 mini-suite, but when I mentioned that I intended to play some low-stakes poker, the desk clerk knocked the tariff down to the "casino rate" of $39 -- about a fourth of weekday room rates on the Strip.
And this is what makes downtown so tourist-friendly. With its traditional customer base siphoned off by the gargantuan resorts on the Strip and by burgeoning Indian casinos in neighboring states, downtown Vegas properties can remain competitive only by offering more for less. The rooms are cheaper, the shows are inexpensive or free, the slots are looser, the table odds are more liberal, the food is abundant and the 99-cent shrimp cocktail boldly lives on.
I threw my bag on the extra-wide king bed and headed out into the throb of Fremont Street. Neon-streaked Fremont, the main artery of vintage Vegas, was the original Glitter Gulch, pulsing with vice long before anyone imagined the Strip.
The iconic, electrified and once-towering image of cowboy Vegas Vic, first erected in 1947, still presides over the street. But now he's dwarfed by a dramatic 90-foot-high space-age canopy studded with more than 12 million lights and 220 speakers powered by a half-million watts of audio power.
