36.1699°N / 115.1398°W · United States
A desert grid, ruled to the mile: the main arteries draw squares a mile across. One street disobeys. Las Vegas Boulevard crosses the grid on the diagonal, from north-east to south-west, and that is the Strip, the street the whole world knows.
You choose the framing, the palette and the words of the caption. The work is drawn from real data, then printed to order in the workshop closest to you.
Downtown holds its tighter streets at the top, around the old railroad depot, where the city began. Interstate 15 doubles the Strip in parallel, and at the southern end of the diagonal the Harry Reid airport lays its rectangle of runways against the hotels. To the north-west, North Las Vegas is a separate municipality with its own offset grid, not a northern district.
And the famous diagonal barely passes through the city at all. Most of the Strip lies in Paradise and Winchester, two unincorporated towns of Clark County. The postal address says Las Vegas across much of the valley, which is why the mistake is so common: an address does not state the jurisdiction. Pull the frame back further and you would see the grid stop dead where the subdivision stops, and the sand take over. That is another poster; this one keeps the diagonal.
The beige of the desert is the ground, and the grey grid sits on it mile by mile, denser at the centre, thinner at the edges. The diagonal of the Strip needs a clear ink, black or a dark red, because it carries the whole reading. Green is rare here: keep it for the golf courses and the Springs Preserve. The grey of the runways makes the great silence of the south.
Vertical, to let the diagonal breathe: Downtown at the top, the airport at the bottom, the Strip from one corner to the other. The mile grid gives the rhythm. Pull further back and you gain something else, the sharp edges where the grid hands over to the sand, which is the truth of this city: a subdivision laid on the desert, not an organic metropolis. But at that distance the diagonal thins to a line. You have to choose, and the opening frame keeps the diagonal.
The title, a line beneath it, the coordinates. A street number, a date, the name of a hotel that is no longer there: that line is what turns a plan of Las Vegas into your plan of Las Vegas.
On 15 and 16 May 1905 the railroad auctioned one hundred and ten acres bounded by Stewart Avenue to the north, Garces Avenue to the south, Main Street to the west and Fifth Street, today’s Las Vegas Boulevard, to the east. The city still keeps 15 May as its birthday. Three years earlier the farmer Helen J. Stewart had had eighteen hundred acres of her ranch surveyed to make way for the line; the rails reached the site from Utah in October 1904 and from California in January 1905.
Clark County issued its first gaming licence to Mayme Stocker and Joe Morgan, at the Northern Club. And work began on the Hoover Dam, the contract signed on 11 March, bringing thousands of workers and starting a boom in the middle of the Depression. The last concrete was poured on 29 May 1935, and Roosevelt opened the dam on 30 September. The town on this map owes its size to those twelve months.
In 1950 Mayor Ernie Cragin wanted to annex the Strip for its taxes. The casinos, led by Gus Greenbaum of the Flamingo, went to the county commissioners instead and obtained unincorporated town status: Paradise was created on 8 December 1950, its first board made up of five casino directors. A Nevada law of 1975 that would have merged Paradise, Winchester and Sunrise Manor into Las Vegas was struck down by the state supreme court. Most of the Strip, the airport and the university are still outside the city.
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The block where you stayed, the crossing you walked at night, the far end of the boulevard where the lights stop. The diagonal is the same for everyone. What you keep on either side of it is not.
Compose my Las Vegas poster
