This is the 18b Arts District, named for the 18 blocks of Las Vegas's original residential and commercial neighborhood that artists, galleries, restaurants, and creative businesses have gradually colonized since the late 1990s. The district sits just south of downtown and just north of the Strip, in the gap between them that the resort economy tended to ignore.
Las Vegas has always had an underground creative culture that existed in parallel to the tourism industry — artists, musicians, and writers who chose the city for its cheap rents, its twenty-four-hour infrastructure, and its outsider status in the American cultural hierarchy. The 18b Arts District gave that community a geography and an identity. First Friday, the monthly art walk and street festival that has run since 2002, transformed the district into a gathering point for the Las Vegas creative class and attracted visitors from throughout the valley.
The district's character is deliberately counter-cultural. Where the Strip celebrates excess and fantasy, the 18b leans toward grit, authenticity, and local identity. Murals cover the sides of buildings. Independent galleries operate in storefronts that elsewhere in Las Vegas would house chain restaurants. The tension between the city that tourists see and the city that residents inhabit is most visible here, in an arts district that exists partly as a critique of everything Las Vegas is supposed to be.