The streets of New York were quiet as my friend and I found a breakfast table under a plastic tree. I sipped tea in the Gatorade-yellow glow of a laundromat’s window, dusty fake leaves tickling my hair. As my friend started talking about the day ahead, she was interrupted by a ruckus: the clattering of a custodian slowly pushing a garbage can over the faux cobblestone sidewalk. It was so loud that we couldn’t hear each other over the din.

“Well,” I said. “At least that’s the real New York City experience.”

For the last 29 years, the New York-New York Las Vegas Hotel & Casino has been the strangest facsimile of an American city anywhere in the world. Things change fast on the Vegas Strip, a place where consumer tastes and billionaires’ pet projects reinvent the landscape every five to 10 years. Once, New York-New York was one of many, but the era of highly themed megaresorts has ended, replaced by elegant, if soulless, hotel towers. But, as a recent stay there showed, that’s made New York-New York — and all its weirdness — more indispensable than ever.

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A view of restaurants in the New York-New York Las Vegas Hotel & Casino on the Vegas Strip in May 2026.

The resort debuted during the Strip’s creative heyday. With the 1990s came New York-New York, Excalibur, Luxor, Treasure Island and MGM Grand, each bursting with over-the-top personality and kid-friendly attractions. Casino operators were momentarily blinded by a conviction that the Strip should also appeal to children, and although that target audience was quickly abandoned by the 2000s, the colorful monuments to excess remained. 

When New York-New York opened in 1997, the main selling point was that it wasn’t New York. One MGM official bragged to the media that it would be “a lot safer, a lot newer” than the actual city. Manhattan was settled in the early 1600s and has a population in the millions, while New York-New York is a hotel in Nevada, so that seemed more like a statement of fact than a selling point. 

Nonetheless, as celebrities, media and the public crowded into the Strip’s latest megaresort, they glowed about how clean, friendly and crime-free it was. “It’s kind of neat to go to a place that reminds you of New York without worrying about being mugged,” singer Wayne Newton quipped.

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The New York Times was less complimentary, calling it the “most ridiculous building imaginable, a cynical slap in........

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