Las Vegas: Swerve the Strip and head Downtown

It’s the place to be if you’re after low-lit cocktail bars, retro neon and award-winning pizza, says Ella Buchan

It’s cocktail o’clock in Downtown – but it didn't used to be (Atomic Liquor)

I’m strolling around a mezzanine, peeping into motel rooms filled with flowers, rubber-tree plants, stained-glass art and bath salts. Yogis bend and arch in the landscaped yard below as the instructor bellows encouragement and music drifts from the speakers. I skirt past them, brushing against a spray of cerise bougainvillea, and pop into bright, airy Mothership Coffee, where I order a lavender latte.

This isn’t the Las Vegas most people know or imagine: the flashiness and flashing lights, the bow-tied poker dealers, the posh hotels and Elvis impersonators. This is old-school Vegas, rebooted. This is Vegas for everyday living. And this is Vegas for visitors looking for experiences beyond that stretch of Las Vegas Boulevard known as the Strip, around five miles south of here.

I’m exploring Fergusons, a disused motel that’s now the centre of a micro-district in Vegas’s once-neglected downtown. The site is dotted with giant sculptures transported from Nevada’s Burning Man festival. There’s a stage for live music and, behind the central courtyard, a hub of tiny homes whose residents include Fergusons’ staff, a sloth and an alpaca.

Local artisans are opening shops and art studios in what were motel rooms while, on street level, Japanese restaurant Hatsumi serves sharing plates and skewers packed with tangy, charred flavours. Across the street, a once-dank alleyway has been brightened with murals and hosts regular community events and a monthly artisan craft market.

It’s a striking example of Downtown Vegas’s regeneration over the past decade. The city started here in 1905, with developments sprawling outwards from the 1940s. Those bigger, flashier casinos and hotels soon eclipsed downtown. The original Vegas was all but lost.

The Fremont Street Experience, five pedestrianised blocks canopied by the world’s largest LED screen, was perhaps the earliest resuscitation attempt, opened in 1995. It’s still a lively hub, with a zipline whizzing over street performers, bar stalls and DJ stages, and music videos playing overhead on the hour. But now the areas around it are buzzing with creativity and life too. Suddenly, Downtown Vegas feels like a place worth visiting in its own right.

Fergusons is a disused motel, which has been transformed (Ella Buchan)

Fergusons’ dramatic makeover is part of a plan dubbed Project Enchilada, a collaboration between private investors and the city to revive a stretch of disused hotels along East Fremont Street as community, retail and restaurant spaces.

The trajectory feels very much pointed skywards. Circa, a huge new hotel and casino from the owners of The D, is due to open this year – the first new-build hotel in Downtown in 40 years. Lip Smacking Foodie Tours, which launched so people could try several restaurants on the Strip in one evening, now offers grazing tours in Downtown and the Arts District, too – and they usually sell out.

A few pioneers have been drawing visitors here for a while. The Neon Museum, for example, which lovingly restores Vegas’s neon signs in a yard on the outskirts of Downtown. For years it was one of the few reasons for tourists to leave the Strip, alongside the Fremont Street Experience and Mob Museum, which traces Vegas back to its gangster roots and has a speakeasy bar, the Underground, with jazz and Prohibition-era cocktails.

All aglow at the Neon Museum (Ella Buchan)

I visit the Neon Museum’s Lost Vegas exhibition, an unprecedented collaboration with director and artist Tim Burton. Until February 2020, Burton’s surreal characters and artwork are dotted among the yard’s permanent collection. Figurines of the aliens from Burton’s star-studded 1996 film Mars Attacks! stalk beneath the Hard Rock Cafe guitar sign. A flickering yellow sign from Beetlejuice, the director’s 1988 movie, is tucked among a tangle of marquee lettering.

It’s compelling and completely surreal. It’s also inspired by Burton’s childhood family holidays to Vegas and his nostalgia for places – including hotels where he stayed – that have since been destroyed. It feels timely; while Burton is re-imagining these lost spaces, efforts to save and restore the place where the city began are ongoing.

For the moment, at least, the regeneration feels like it’s happening to the benefit of locals, rather than by pushing them out. Vincent Rotolo’s restaurant Good Pie specialises in artisan bread bases and “Grandma-style” pizza, named because Brooklyn grandmothers would bake their “pies” on rectangular cookie trays. It’s outgrown the original location, a hole-in-the-wall on the edge of Downtown. His new place is due to open late 2019 in the Arts District, which has become a hub for creatives from potters and muralists to chefs and mixologists.

Good Pie pizza specialises in Grandma-style pizza (Good Pie)

There’ll be a takeaway window for New York-style slices, but the rest of the menu will focus on high-quality seasonal toppings from buffalo mozzarella to truffle. “There’s a sense of real community here,” Vincent says. “There’s every bit as much creativity and soul as the Strip. More than the Strip.”

This area is a 20-minute walk from Downtown, via a courthouse, wedding chapels and unlit, abandoned motel signs. Project Enchilada’s aim is to turn this into a walkable neon corridor with restored motel signs and street art.

You could easily spend a day or two exploring the Art District’s vintage emporiums, bookshops and art studios, perhaps starting with an Italian-inspired brunch at Esther’s Kitchen, with Scandi-style decor, an open kitchen and some of the most delicious sourdough bread and butter I’ve tasted.

There’s always something going on in Lyft Art Park (Ella Buchan)

It’s a shame there isn’t a hotel here (yet), because the area also has some of the city’s best nightlife. Microbreweries like Able Baker, in a bright, open warehouse with steel tanks at the back, make a refreshing, laid-back alternative to the glitzy clubs and touristy pubs of the Strip.

Flights of saisons, IPAs and a chocolatey port come with a rubber duck (which you can keep). It’s a nod to the legend of the “atomic duck”, which apparently survived nuclear weapons testing that took place in the Nevada desert in the 1950s and waddled off, unscathed, into the desert.

Around the corner is another survivor. Velveteen Rabbit was pretty lonely when it opened in 2013. Sisters Christina and Pamela Dylag grew up here, left after high school – and had no plans to return. Business incentives brought them back to the area and, heartened by the burgeoning creative scene, they took over the burnt-out shell of an old upholstery shop, transforming it into the area’s first cocktail bar.

It’s a cool space with a warm heart. They’ve created a sociable spot to bring people together, from a long wooden bar serving seasonally driven cocktails to a dance floor space and twinkly-lit garden. “We didn’t know if this kind of thing would go well here because it just didn’t exist,” says Christina. “There wasn’t a whole lot here.”

“People didn’t want to come to the area, especially at night,” adds Pamela. “If you grew up here, you had an itch to leave. Now people who have grown up here are trying to put energy into the city. It’s keeping things authentic.”

Travel essentials

Getting there

Virgin Atlantic flies to Las Vegas from Heathrow from £315 return.

Staying there

Doubles at The D, close to the Fremont Street Experience, start at around £40 per night, room only.

More information

See visitlasvegas.com

For the best hotels in Las Vegas, click here.