Mandalay Bay + Allegiant Stadium

On your left, those bronze towers catching the sun are Mandalay Bay — and that gold is real: twenty-four-karat gold, fused right into the glass. It opened in 1999, and somewhere inside, in the middle of the driest desert in North America, there is a saltwater aquarium full of sharks.

Now look past it, to the west. That dark spaceship of a building is Allegiant Stadium — locals just call it the Death Star. It cost around one-point-nine billion dollars, opened in 2020, and finally gave the Raiders a Las Vegas home. Three years later it hosted the Super Bowl. And the road you're on right now became a Formula One racetrack in November 2023 — the cars ran straight up this stretch of the Boulevard in the dark, at over three hundred kilometres an hour.

On the first of October, 2017, this part of the Strip was the site of the deadliest mass shooting by one person in modern American history, when a gunman fired down on an open-air country-music festival from a window of Mandalay Bay; fifty-eight people were killed, and a memorial garden downtown keeps their names.

This is a city that folds even its hardest days into its memory rather than paving over them. Keep heading north on the Boulevard. Coming up on your left, you honestly cannot miss it: a jet-black glass pyramid, with a single blinding beam of light shooting straight up out of the very top.