It doesn't take long to come to grips with the physical layout of Las Vegas. Downtown , slightly southeast of the intersection of I-15 and US-95, may stand at the center of an urban sprawl that stretches fifteen miles in all directions, but it's the legendary Strip , starting two miles south of downtown, where the main action takes place. In fact, by no coincidence at all, the Strip begins at the point where Las Vegas Boulevard leaves the city limits, and casino owners are therefore not liable to city taxes.

The Strip itself consists of the four miles of Las Vegas Boulevard between the Sahara and Mandalay Bay , and thus now reaches as far south as McCarran Airport. Almost every building along the way is a casino, each frantically clamoring for the attention of the tourists who throng the road day and night. For the sake of convenience, it's often loosely divided into the South Strip , from Mandalay Bay up to the MGM Grand and New York-New York ; the Central Strip , which includes Bellagio, Caesars Palace and the Venetian ; and the North Strip , from the Stardust to the Sahara .

Whatever you might expect, downtown Las Vegas is not a bustling area where locals go about their business far from the mayhem of the Strip. Instead, it too is utterly dominated by casinos. Its centerpiece, the Fremont Street Experience , is an extraordinary architectural conceit, in which four blocks of its main thoroughfare have been roofed over to give it the feel of a theme park rather than a real city. An unfortunate side effect has been to make the rest of downtown seem even more derelict and menacing than before; it is not an area any visitor should attempt to explore.

In between the Strip and downtown lie two somewhat seedy miles of gas stations, fast-food drive-ins, and wedding chapels, parts of which have been optimistically but pointlessly promoted as the Gateway District .

Being closely paralleled by both the I-15 interstate and the (currently inactive) railroad line, the Strip also serves as the dividing line between east and west Las Vegas. The closest attempt to match the success of the Strip has been along Paradise Road , immediately to the east and home to the Las Vegas Hilton , the Convention Center, the Hard Rock , and several popular restaurants. A large campus to the east of Paradise Road, between Flamingo and Tropicana avenues, houses UNLV - the University of Nevada Las Vegas - whose students tend to hang out on Maryland Parkway , another block east.

Although the area to the west of the Strip is less susceptible to generalization, the Rio and the Palms have encouraged tourists to stray across to the far side of the interstate, and Decatur Boulevard , especially around Sahara Avenue, is a thriving shopping district.

City residents, of course, can distinguish between the demographic profiles of any number of Las Vegas neighborhoods , but tourists spend so little of their time anywhere other than the Strip or downtown that they can remain oblivious. Broadly speaking, the northeast and northwest quadrants of the city are its less affluent areas, while its most fashionable district is Henderson to the southwest - ranked in its own right as one of America's fastest-growing cities - with the new Summerlin development to the east tipped as a future rival.