Photos of Las Vegas off the Strip

The south end of Las Vegas Blvd. We drove about 40 miles south on Las Vegas Blvd. in March 2006 past Mandalay Bay, past the cities of Jean and Primm, and this is what it looked like at the time.

Harry Reid International Airport & The Luxor. This photo shows how close the airport (Harry Reid International; formerly known as McCarran) is to Las Vegas Blvd. (also known as The Strip.) The airport property actually goes right up to and borders Las Vegas Blvd. The Virgin Hotel (formerly the Hard Rock) is the closest hotel to the airport. Google Maps shows a distance of 1.1 miles from the north end of the airport. The nearest strip property is MGM Grand at 1.3 miles. However, the distance from the north end of the airport to the terminals is about a mile, so figure 2.3 miles for MGM Grand, which you can easily walk if you just have one small carryon bag.

Naked City/Meadows Village - March 2005. We walked through the area behind the Stratosphere that was known as Naked City aka Meadows Village in March 2005. This is how it looked. The name "Naked City" allegedly came from a time when showgirls were not allowed to have tan lines and sunbathed naked.

Buffalo Bill's in Primm, Nevada closed July 7, 2025 and Whiskey Pete's closed in December 2024. These photos were taken in March 2006 when we decided to head south on Las Vegas Blvd. until we reached the end (that photo is also on this page.) They were unable to recover from lengthy Covid pandemic closures.

Gold Coast Las Vegas is a budget property next to the Rio and across the street from Palms. Since we don't have any good photos of it, we're putting it in "off the strip" rather than giving it its own page. I don't think we've ever gone inside either. Maybe once, we've stayed at Rio twice, which is when we would've gone there.

Aztec Inn is a dive casino on the west side of Las Vegas Blvd. just past Sahara Ave., on the way to the Strat.

Arizona Charlie's has 2 locations in Las Vegas, 740 S. Decatur and 4575 Boulder Hwy, which is the one shown in the images above.

This is one of my earliest Las Vegas photos, probably 1992 or 1993, it was taken with a disposable cardboard film camera. This is the cactus at the intersection of Wayne Newton Blvd. and Kitty Hawk Way, which is along the pedestrian and bicycle route from the strip to Las Vegas airport (formerly McCarran Airport, now Harry Reid Airport.) I recall that I had reserved a rental car at the Budget Rent A Car office on Las Vegas Blvd. across the street from the Frontier (which is now the Resorts World area). I don't recall why I walked from the airport, however. I do recall that the car rental prices were much lower at non-airport offices. Smart phones would not exist for another 20 years, so it was impossible to shoot videos for YouTube at this time. I did document this walk however in 2018 and 2019 on my urbanphotos Las Vegas YouTube channel. I'm fairly certain that I included a shot of the cactus in at least one of those videos also, so you can see how it's changed between the early 90s and 2018-19.

This image of Red Rock Canyon was taken around 1995 during one of the trips when we had a rental car. It was a film camera, either disposable cardboard or the Yashica T4 Super. We rented cars 4 or 5 times out of about 25 visits to Las Vegas and found that overall having a car was more inconvenient than not having one. Especially now that strip properties are charging for parking. If you're just going to visit properties on the strip and downtown, you don't need a rental car. The main reason to get a car is for long distance trips such as Hoover Dam, the Grand Canyon, Valley of Fire, Red Rock Canyon, etc. If you fly into Las Vegas from the north, you can usually see this large formation of red rocks on the left side of the plane about 10 minutes before landing.

This image from August 2002 shows Red Rock Canyon from the plane, as described above.