For a city that styles itself the "Entertainment Capital of the World," and has long been known for its famous headliners and lounge acts, not to mention its infamous mobsters, it's no great surprise that there are streets named for celebrities in this town. What is a little strange is the fact that a lot of the big names associated with Las Vegas (e.g., Liberace, Siegfried & Roy, Sammy Davis Jr.) do not have thoroughfares bearing their names, while a whole host of stars who never performed here, some of whom almost certainly never even visited, do (Audrey Hepburn, Bela Lugosi, Butch Cassidy etc.)
We tackled the interesting subject of bizarre Las Vegas street names in a previous QoD (7/14/08), which was sparked by a reader coming across the Star Wars neighborhood (yes, we have a Skywalker Avenue and Leia Street). Allow us to quote from that previous answer for some background, before we give you the complete rundown of what we found this time around, focusing solely on celebs (rather than Starbucks products, celestial bodies, household cleaning items, fishing tackle, and the other unlikely subjects our town planners have seen fit to sanction for street names):
Each year about 1,600 new streets are added to Las Vegas Valley and the task of naming them falls to the developers, who evidently tend to be an imaginative and poetic bunch (when they're not delegating the task to their 12-year-old sons). They submit their proposed list to the Las Vegas Fire Dept., which then approves or denies the names according to the Las Vegas Valley Street Naming and Address Assignment Policy. If the Fire Dept. gives the thumbs up, a temporary map is then presented to the Planning Commission, which has final word in the approval process.
Some of the criteria used when making these decisions include the exclusion of same names or homonyms (the emergency services communicate by radio and don’t want any aural confusion), street names in foreign languages ("unless their meaning is polite and reasonable"), names that tend to be slurred or may be difficult to pronounce, and any name with more than 20 letters and spaces (due to the physical restrictions of the size of a standard street-name sign).
Aside from that there's a lot of latitude, hence all the real street names cited [in the QoD] cited above. One other interesting criterion is that "only the common or correct spelling of street names will be accepted (e.g., Jane not Jayne, Green not Greene)," which may be the explanation for Betty (sic) Davis Street. On the other hand, this may be due to the fact that the Fire Dept. is also not permitted to correct a misspelling that's submitted, hence Bugsy Siegal (oops) Circle.
So, there's how it all works. And here, in no particular order at all, are all the streets we've been able to find that are named after famous people. If anyone knows of one we missed, please drop us a line and we'll keep adding to the list:
