Downtown is the older half of Las Vegas, and the part that is actually in it. The Strip lies outside the city limits altogether, in unincorporated Clark County; downtown begins a few miles north of it, and holds the municipal government, the original casinos and Fremont Street.
It is a different proposition from the Strip — more compressed, walkable in a way the Strip is not, and considerably less polished.
The covered pedestrian section of Fremont Street, with the casinos along it and the screen overhead, is covered separately under Fremont Street. What follows is what surrounds it.
Immediately east of the canopy — between Las Vegas Boulevard and 8th Street, and between Ogden Avenue and Carson Street — is the Fremont East district, designated in 2002. Six blocks of bars, restaurants and small shops, and unlike the covered section it works as an ordinary street, with traffic on it.
Two blocks north of Fremont Street on Stewart Avenue, in the former Las Vegas post office and courthouse of 1933. Formally the National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement, it opened in February 2012.
Its centrepiece is the second-floor courtroom, which held one of the fourteen Kefauver Committee hearings into organised crime in 1950 and 1951 — so the building is part of the history it sets out, which is unusual and is what lifts the place above its subject. The collection includes the wall from the St Valentine's Day Massacre. A basement speakeasy and distillery was added in 2018.
Signs retired from casinos that have been demolished or rebranded, displayed outdoors in a yard known as the Boneyard, on Las Vegas Boulevard North. Several are relit after dark, and the collection is the most direct record there is of what the city looked like before the present generation of resorts. Older signs keep arriving as the Strip rebuilds itself.
South of downtown, around Main Street and Charleston Boulevard, is the Arts District — known locally as 18b. Galleries, antique shops, breweries, and the restaurants the city's own residents tend to name first; Esther's Kitchen is the best known of them.
The downtown casinos are smaller and older than those on the Strip, and the minimum stakes are generally lower. How a casino floor is arranged, why it is arranged that way, and the arithmetic underneath it are set out under Las Vegas casinos.
Downtown sits about four miles north of the northern end of the Strip. The Deuce bus runs between the two along Las Vegas Boulevard and is the cheapest way to make the trip; a taxi or ride-hailing car is quicker. General practicalities for the city are on the Las Vegas page.