For more than a month as of late August, the Naked City neighborhood tucked behind The STRAT recorded zero violent crime — a stunning milestone for a pocket of Las Vegas that spent decades as shorthand for drug use and gang activity. Calls for service in the surrounding Gateway District have fallen from 6,352 in 2022 to a projected 4,000 this year, and a wave of new restaurants, renovated apartments, and a from-the-ground-up housing project are moving into a neighborhood that hadn’t seen new residential construction in over 65 years.
A Neighborhood Built for Casino Workers, Then Left Behind
Naked City sits north of the Strip, just behind The STRAT hotel-casino, stretching from West Sahara Avenue north to East Charleston Boulevard near Interstate 15, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. The area was platted in the 1920s as the Meadows Addition and originally provided centrally located housing for casino workers on the northern Strip, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Local legend has long credited the Naked City nickname to showgirls sunbathing nude on apartment rooftops in the 1950s and 1960s, per the Review-Journal’s original reporting, though local news media and police logs officially attached the moniker during an early 1980s surge in gang activity. Whatever its origin, the name stuck as the neighborhood became, in later decades, a haven for drug use and crime.
That history had real consequences for the neighborhood’s biggest neighbor. The STRAT, which opened in 1996 as the 1,149-foot Stratosphere Tower under casino pioneer Bob Stupak, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1997 partly because of depressed visitor foot traffic tied to the adjacent high-crime area, before financier Carl Icahn purchased the property in 1998. Golden Entertainment later bought the tower and rebranded it as The STRAT in 2019. Today, the Review-Journal reports, The STRAT partners with other business leaders and property owners on safety and cleanliness discussions in the district.
Police Credit a Model Built in West Las Vegas
The turnaround has coincided with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department’s 2022 expansion of its Safe Village Initiative into the Gateway District — a community-policing strategy designed to reduce violent crime by addressing its root causes, per the Review-Journal. LVMPD first launched the framework in West Las Vegas back in 2007, earning the department the International Association of Chiefs of Police’s Webber Seavey Award for Quality in Law Enforcement in 2011. Metro now dedicates two full-time officers to Naked City specifically. Metro Sgt. Miles Peshlakai reported that crime was down month over month in the neighborhood, and told the Review-Journal that Naked City had gone more than a month without a single violent crime as of late August.
The agency deploying that strategy, LVMPD, was itself formed in July 1973 through a state legislative merger of the Las Vegas Police Department and the Clark County Sheriff’s Office, consolidating regional policing under one roof. The Gateway District’s monthly community meeting now brings together developers, business owners, community leaders and residents — a forum the Review-Journal describes as central to sustaining the drop in calls for service.
New Housing Breaks a 65-Year Drought
Developer David Raanan secured entitlements for an 87-unit residential project at 215 Philadelphia Avenue, known as The Philly at 215, which will include 81 studio apartments and six one-bedroom units. The project, per the Review-Journal, would be one of the first significant ground-up residential developments in Naked City in decades. Raanan moved to the nearby Allure Condos — a 41-story luxury tower on West Sahara Avenue near Las Vegas Boulevard — in 2019, and has discussed using low-income housing tax credits to make the new construction financially feasible…