Downtown
Downtown
Time Travel on Fremont Street
July 19th, 2012
Downtown continues to mine a balanced—and, so far, successful—strategy of mixing Old Vegas nostalgia with modernized amenities. Nowhere is the Janus-faced approach that’s come to define downtown as apparent as at The D. The most obvious example is the split-level casino, which looks to the present on the first floor and the past on the second. Owner Derek Stevens has built on what worked for him at the just-renovated Golden Gate, mixing sex appeal, comfort food and gestures to the past. In some spots, old and new overlap: The D’s second-floor coin-op machines still take slot cards, so players can rack up new-school points. Read more »
About Town
Chasing Tony Hsieh
July 19th, 2012
I want to step carefully here, because I like most everything the Downtown Project is doing or plans to do. I can’t wait to see the shipping-container park planned for Fremont and Seventh, and I’m dying to eat at Natalie Young’s new brunch spot Eat, now building at Seventh and Carson. And anyone who sinks as much money into educational programs as Tony Hsieh has is all right in my book. But in looking at the plans for his container park, which now include a geodesic dome, I got a weird feeling, like I was looking at a world’s fair exhibit: Tony Hsieh’s take on Walt Disney’s original Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow, only hipper. It looks like a HEPCOT—more a playful model for a future city than a concrete plan for an existing one. Read more »
Downtown
Blasting Back
June 28th, 2012
The new owners hope to keep as much of the original Atomic Liquors stuff as possible, only making changes where necessary—the bathrooms, for example, need to be expanded to meet ADA requirements. Later, they plan to create a beer garden and performance space in the vacated garage next door. Read more »
Downtown
If You Map It …
June 7th, 2012
The next time you’re in the Arts District, be sure to wander up Antique Alley. Read more »
Dining
Downtown, the Sunny Side Is Up
May 31st, 2012
Breakfast is coming to Fremont East. In September, local chef Natalie Young—a veteran of the Eiffel Tower Restaurant at Paris Las Vegas, Mr. Lucky’s at the Hard Rock Hotel and several prominent others—will open Eat, a café serving breakfasts and lunches of made-from-scratch American comfort food “with a bit of classic French technique,” Young says. Read more »
The Week
Unpacking Containerville
May 24th, 2012
Walking through the Fremont East entertainment district is pleasant up to a point. That point is located precisely at the southeast corner of Seventh and Fremont streets, where a trash-strewn asphalt lot provides empirical proof of just how far downtown Las Vegas has yet to go before we can even begin to call this neighborhood “gentrified.” Read more »
Green Felt Journal
The Man Behind The D
April 19th, 2012
Although the energy of Tony Hsieh and other non-gamers has helped fuel the transformation of downtown Las Vegas, a cadre of Fremont Street casino owners also deserve credit. Derek Stevens is prominent among them. Stevens is overseeing two downtown remodeling projects: the addition of a new high-roller gaming area and 16 suites to the historic Golden Gate (the building housed the city’s first hotel, which opened in 1906), and the transformation of Fitzgeralds into The D. Read more »
The Latest Thought
Downtown, Unbuttoned
The city wanted to keep the homeless from sleeping in a downtown plaza. So it ruined the plaza.
April 12th, 2012
Earlier this year, the city affixed more than 200 hard white plastic “buttons” onto the benches of the corridor and the planters of the adjacent plaza. Against the sandstone benches and mauve planters, the white buttons look ludicrous. They’re normally used as roadway traffic devices. Needless to say, roadway traffic devices are neither an intelligent solution to homelessness nor a way to craft quality public space. Read more »
The Week
The Rising, the Falling and the Forgotten
April 12th, 2012
Each day, another piece of this new era falls into place—choice bits of history are preserved, others destroyed, and new contexts arise. If you stand here at the fenced-off Motel 6, next to faded racks of porn and across the street from the bustling Beat coffeehouse, you feel like you’re right in the thick of history—of this modernizing, or post-modernizing, of downtown. Read more »
Dining
Resto Change-o
February 16th, 2012
Don’t blink—downtown’s burgeoning dining scene is liable to change when you’re not looking. Read more »
