Lady Luck Closing for Renovations

Downtown is one of the touchiest subjects in Las Vegas. When I moved here in 1999 almost no one I met lived there or even went there unless they were called for jury duty or got a traffic ticket. One of the commonplaces about Las Vegas that few outsiders fully grasp is that the Las Vegas Strip is not in Las Vegas where the city limit is at Sahara Avenue. Everything South of Sahara falls into Clark County (and, more specifically Paradise Township, created to fend off the Strip's annexation by Las Vegas decades ago). This confusion can have serious moments such as when Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman in 2004 made headlines complaining that the FBI did not give him information about video captured from terrorism suspects in 2002 that showed Mandalay Bay, MGM Grand, Luxor and Excalibur. They Mayor did not mention that his city does not include any of those properties and blurred and buried amidst the controversy was that the FBI had informed the proper Clark Country authorities.