Welcome To Fabulous Paradise, Nevada

It doesn't have the same ring, does it?

The reality is that most of what people think is Las Vegas is in fact not the case at all.

One of most common misconceptions about Las Vegas is that The Strip is within the City Of Las Vegas. The reality is that The Strip is actually within two townships called Paradise and Winchester. What is considered to be The Strip ends once you cross Sahara Avenue on Las Vegas Blvd. So many visitors to the Las Vegas area never even set foot in Las Vegas proper yet think they went to Las Vegas. This is a misconception that has gotten folks for years; even casino operators have fallen into this trap. Back in the early 1970s when Bob Stupak bought the property that currently is the site of the Stratosphere, he tried to claim his casino (Bob Stupak's Million Dollar Gambling Museum & Casino) was on the Strip because it was on Las Vegas Blvd.

Paradise and Winchester have their origins in an attempt by the City Of Las Vegas in 1950 to annex The Strip in order to expand the tax base for the city in order to help fund some projects as well as to pay down debt. Not surprisingly, the casino owners on the then-fledgling Strip (At the time, the Strip consisted of The Flamingo, the El Rancho Vegas, the Thunderbird, the Hotel Last Frontier, the Silver Slipper and the Desert Inn.) were none too happy of the city trying to muscle in on them. So a group of casino executives (led by Gus Greenbaum of the Flamingo) went to the Clark County Commission and lobbied for them to grant the area township status so the the City Of Las Vegas would have to get approval from the commission to annex the land. The commission approved this in December of 1950 setting the stage for the creation of "Paradise City" and setting a precedence for other similar unincorporated townships within Clark County as a way to prevent the City of Las Vegas, the City Of North Las Vegas and the City Of Henderson from annexing land and affecting the county's tax base.

So if The Strip is not within the City Of Las Vegas, why do they have Las Vegas mailing addresses?


I think that it boils down to marketing the region as a tourist destination. For example, if you were taking the family to Disney World, you'd say you're taking the family to Orlando and not Lake Buena Vista or Bay Lake (Which are the "towns" in which the Walt Disney World Resort lie within, and are the ultimate description of a "company town" since Disney effectively controls those towns.). The entire region is marketed to tourists as "Orlando" even though the main attraction for the region (Walt Disney World) is over 20 miles from Orlando. Even Walt Disney World even uses Orlando as their location.

So the marketers in Las Vegas have done pretty much the same way by referring to the entire area as Las Vegas (The entire region is often referred to as the "Las Vegas Valley" or "Vegas Valley".) even though the primary tourist corridor is not located within the City Of Las Vegas. Even the USPS has helped to maintain this illusion (Isn't that what Vegas is about, creating and maintaining illusions?)by not having a Paradise, NV or Winchester, NV ZIP Code.

I'm sure the fact that the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police patrol The Strip adds to confusion as well since the majority of visitors have no idea that the LVMPD is actually a joint police force of the City of Las Vegas PD and the Clark County Sheriff's Department that has been in existence since 1973 (The creation of Metro was a pretty contentious issue back then and it's early years were pretty rough. A lot of this is covered in the book, "The Battle For Las Vegas. The Law VS. The Mob" by Dennis N. Griffin, as a lot of the internal conflicts within Metro factored into the Mob activities of the era.). Tourists see Las Vegas on the badge and on the shoulder patch on the uniforms and that probably adds to the confusion as well.

Well in the end, it's still Las Vegas regardless of whether you're hanging our on Fremont Street or kicking it on The Strip.