Las Vegas just celebrated Pride last weekend and is gearing up for its biggest night of the year �" New Year's Eve. While the big gay New Year's party, Evolve, is not happening this year, LGBTs will mix into the mainstream celebration as Las Vegas Boulevard shuts down to accommodate the overflow crowds that will pour into the street at midnight to watch the fireworks.
If you are planning on being in Vegas for New Year's, make your hotel reservation now. Hotels sell out early and you won't find any bargains on that night. There are also a number of restaurants with a bird's eye view of the fireworks, but early reservations are a must.
While Las Vegas is the place to be for New Year's, the deck is stacked year-round with plenty to see and do. If you are looking for a bargain, between now and the end of the year is a good time. November through Christmas tends to be slow in Vegas and the smaller crowds translate into bargain hotel rates. You also won't have to deal with the notoriously bad traffic jams on the Las Vegas Strip during very busy times.
The Strip and downtown
For the uninitiated, almost all the tourist attractions in Las Vegas are either on the Strip or in the downtown area. The Strip is the 4.2-mile section of Las Vegas Boulevard between the Mandalay Bay resort at Russell Road to Sahara Avenue, just south of the Stratosphere Tower. The Strip is just outside of the Las Vegas city limits, in an unincorporated section of Clark County. The city of Las Vegas doesn't begin until Sahara Avenue.
Many tourists never make it beyond the mega casino/resorts on the Strip but downtown Las Vegas is emerging as the new hip place to hang out. Entrepreneurs, many LGBT, have joined forces with the techies and hipsters to bring new life to downtown, which up until recent years was a place where people were afraid to be at night.
Las Vegas is notorious for literally blowing up old stuff to make way for the new. But there is a new appreciation in downtown for preserving the city's past while embracing the new. Old Las Vegas is best known for neon lights and you will see an old restored neon sign on every block from the north end of the Strip, past the center of downtown to the Neon Museum (http://www.neonmuseum.org/). That museum's "boneyard" is a fascinating collection of restored signs of casinos and resorts that have come and gone.
Another museum in the heart of downtown documents part of Vegas' past that is quickly becoming a distant memory: organized crime. While mobster money helped build the city, authorities were eventually able to end the stranglehold of corruption that marked the mob's influence. That shady past is now chronicled in the Mob Museum ( http://themobmuseum.org/), which is ironically in the city's former courthouse. The modern interactive museum opened four years ago and documents the mob's rise and fall in the U.S. as well as its depictions in movies and TV.
In the heart of downtown, the Fremont Street Experience (http://vegasexperience.com/) is a pedestrian mall covered with a light canopy with light and music shows every half hour after sunset. If sitting around and just watching is not participatory enough for you, you can fly through the air on a zip line.
Be sure to check out a walking tour of Las Vegas. One of the best is the gay-owned and -operated Las Vegas Pop Culture Tours (http://www.lasvegaspopculturetours.com/). Babs Daitch and Richard Hooker can give you all of the fascinating behind-the-scenes scoop on Vegas, plus the lesbian and gay history of the city. The guides can also point out the gay-owned businesses downtown that have helped spark its revitalization.
Those businesses include the very popular coffee shop PublicUS; the wonderful deli and grocery store; the Market; the Southwest Louisiana-themed Zydeco Po-Boys restaurant; Hub Modern Home and Gift; the candy shop, Sweet Spot; and the discount fragrance shop, Scentual Scents. The latter three are part of the open-air Downtown Container Park, made up of shops and restaurants housed in shipping containers. A giant flame-throwing praying mantis stands guard in front of the park. Las Vegas Pop Culture Tours offers tours of both downtown Vegas and the Strip.
Las Vegas began 110 years ago as a railroad stop in the area now known as downtown. For years, the stretch of Las Vegas Boulevard leading to downtown was not much more than a glorified roadside attraction leading to the big city. When developer Steve Wynn opened the Mirage on the Strip in 1989, it set a new standard of luxury in Vegas and ignited a building boom, ushering in MGM, Treasure Island, Paris Las Vegas, Bellagio, the Venetian, and more.
The newest casino-resort on the Strip is also one of the best, the SLS (http://slshotels.com/lasvegas/). It opened two years ago in place of the Sahara Hotel, on the north end of the Strip, just south of the Stratosphere Tower. SLS stands for Style Luxury Service and the resort more than lives up to those words. It became part of the Starwood Hotels and Resorts group last year and in December one of the SLS' towers will reopen as Vegas' first W Hotel.
The LINQ ( www.thelinq.com) is another of the newer casino-resorts on the Strip. It also opened just two years ago and includes Vegas' newest landmark, the world's tallest Ferris wheel, the High Roller. It measures 550 feet, about 100 feet taller than the London Eye. The LINQ used to be the Quad, which used to be the Imperial Palace. By the way, the LINQ will be one of the host hotels for the Dinah Vegas (http://www.dinahshoreweekend.com/), which is scheduled for late April 2017. The LINQ also hosts Vegas' gayest, and one of its best, shows, Divas. It features Frank Marino, who plays Joan Rivers, and a wonderful cast of female impersonators who do everyone from Diana Ross to Reba McEntire. Ticket prices start at a very reasonable $24.99, a bargain price for a Vegas show.
For one of the most unique shopping experiences, check out the Miracle Mile ( http://www.miraclemileshopslv.com/) shops on the Strip. The indoor mall is a mile long and is designed to look like an old Middle Eastern town with a permanent dawn-like sky. The shops range from bargain to the upscale, including H&M. It includes a wide variety of both casual and fast food restaurants. The latest addition is the fab Nacho Daddy, which opened two months ago. If you want to get paid to get your opinion heard, check out the Test America shop. It will pay you to test products or a TV show. It doesn't pay much, but enough to cover a cheap lunch.
Speaking of inexpensive lunches, in recent years Las Vegas has shifted from offering a wide variety of restaurants offering bargain eats to ones that emphasize gourmet food, quality service, and upscale surroundings. Some of the best feature great views of the Strip, including Guida and HEXX that will undoubtedly fill up early for New Year's Eve fireworks.
Las Vegas' newest open space is part of the MGM Resorts (https://www.mgmresorts.com/) and it is called, simply, the Park. It is next to New York-New York, in front of the T-Mobile Arena, which just opened in April. A giant sculpture of a dancing woman is one of the park's highlights. One of the best casual and inexpensive dining spots there is Beerhaus. But if you are driving to the Park, you will have to pay for parking. In June, MGM became the first of the resorts to charge for parking. The impacted hotels include ARIA, Bellagio, Delano/Mandalay Bay, MGM Grand, Mirage, and New York-New York. If driving and on a budget, you would be better off to park in a nearby property and walk, or you might want to skip the MGM resorts altogether. But parking is still cheap by Bay Area standards: free for the first hour, $7 for one to four hours, and $10 for 4 to 24 hours.
If you feel like getting out of the city, an easy excursion is Boulder City and Hoover Dam, about a 45-minute drive away. The dam is open for regularly scheduled tours during the day and you can walk across the dam anytime before sunset. The best view of the dam is from the new Mike O'Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge, which opened in 2010 just south of the dam. But the view is not great driving over it because of the concrete safety barriers on either side. The best view is reserved for pedestrians. Look for the parking lot and walking path up to the bridge on the road before you get to the dam. Boulder City is a quaint town that was built to house the 1930s dam workers. The town has a museum dedicated to the people who built Hoover Dam.
Nightlife
Las Vegas does not have a gay neighborhood, but the biggest cluster of gay bars is along the so-called Fruit Loop. That is where you will find the upscale Piranha on Paradise Road, near East Naples Drive, about 1.5 miles from the Strip. There are no full-time lesbian bars, but gay women are very welcome at most of the predominantly gay male bars including Piranha, which hosted a lesbian Pride eve party. Quadz video bar is across the street from Piranha on East Naples. It is located where the old Buffalo bar was. It is right next door to the gay bookstore, Get Booked. The friendly and divey Free Zone bar is across the street from Get Booked and Quadz.
The city's newest gay bar is the Locker Room, just a block from the Free Zone, also along East Naples Drive. It offers pizza, cheap drinks, and live entertainment.
The Garage is about 1.5 miles from the Fruit Loop on East Flamingo Road. It has been open about five years and is the place to watch sports and play pool, darts, and shuffleboard. By the way, the Garage owners bought out Vegas' oldest gay bar, Snick's Place, last year. They renamed it Bastille on 3rd, (it's at 1402 S 3rd Street) and it is Vegas' only downtown bar. It still has the friendly Cheers-like feel of the old Snick's and plans are in the works to expand the bar to the property next door. The corner where Bastille is situated represents the gay community with a beautiful LGBT-themed mural.
Other popular gay nightlife options include the Phoenix, known for the distinctive fiery red eagle painted on its exterior. It hosts a lesbian night on the last Saturday of every month.
The country western themed Charlie's Las Vegas has a famous underwear night on Wednesdays, when the bar serves free drinks to customers who take off their pants. Across town, on East Tropicana Avenue, the Las Vegas Eagle has an underwear and Karaoke night on Tuesday and Friday nights.
The weekend nightclub, Share, draws a big crowd. It's on Wynn Road near the Orleans Hotel and Casino.
For more information
For a good overall blog on Las Vegas, visit http://www.gayvegastravel.com. For the city's official tourism site, visithttp://www.lasvegas.com and click on the LGBT section under the trip-planning tab on the right.