KVIG Informative

Nevada’s transportation agency walled off F Street with a concrete barrier in 2008, severing the Historic Westside from downtown Las Vegas — a neighborhood the city itself had pushed Black residents into eight decades earlier. The wall came down in 2014, and Las Vegas is still spending to reconnect what it cut off.

The city of Las Vegas asked Black residents to move out of downtown and into the area that became known as the Westside starting in 1929, threatening the business licenses of those who did not comply, according to the city’s own Westside Timeline, published through its HUNDRED Plan initiative. Black residents began purchasing land in the area by 1930, the timeline states.

Railroad tracks had already separated the Westside from downtown for 32 years before the Clark Avenue Railroad Underpass, also known as the Bonanza Underpass, opened in 1937 and allowed trade to resume between the two areas, according to the same timeline.

The neighborhood grew into a self-sufficient commercial and cultural district over the following decades, with its own churches, schools and businesses along Jackson Avenue, the timeline states.

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A Nevada Department of Transportation freeway-widening project walled off F Street with a concrete barrier in 2008, severing the Westside from downtown for a second time, according to the city’s Westside Timeline.

The underpass reopened in December 2014, after six years of closure, with new murals marking the span as part of the Historic Westside, the timeline states.

The city adopted the HUNDRED Plan — short for Historic Urban Neighborhood Design Redevelopment — in 2016 as a community-led investment strategy for the neighborhood, developed with UNLV’s Design Center through a series of resident workshops held in early 2015, according to the city’s own account of the plan. A group of roughly 60 Westside stakeholders, city staff and design professionals met in December 2019 to advance initial implementation along Jackson Avenue and the Washington Avenue corridor, the city states.

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Construction on shareDOWNTOWN Westside, a development of 104 apartments and about 13,000 square feet of retail space, broke ground March 21, 2024, and is scheduled for completion in 2026, according to the city’s own 2026 update on the neighborhood. The Good Word Market Hall, a food hall built to incubate as many as three food-based startup businesses, is also scheduled to open in 2026, the city states.

Ninety-seven years after city officials pushed Black residents out of downtown and into the Westside, and 18 years after a freeway project walled the same neighborhood off again, Las Vegas is funding its reconnection one development at a time.