Residents
Spring Valley is the home of tennis players Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf, as well as former Sacramento Kings owners George J. Maloof, Jr. The Sultan of Brunei keeps a residence there, and Carrot Top has his Las Vegas residence in the area. NASCAR drivers Kurt and Kyle Busch attended Durango High School in Spring Valley, as did actress Cerina Vincent and BMX celebrity T. J. Lavin. Kris Bryant lived in Spring Valley. Nevada governor Steve Sisolak keeps his private residence in Spring Valley.
Chinatown
The strip malls along Spring Mountain Road and surrounding streets, from Valley View to Jones Boulevard in Spring Valley into Paradise, house many ethnic Chinese and other pan-Asian businesses, with the original called Chinatown Plaza. The district is primarily a retail destination, rather than a residential enclave, catering to Asian Americans.
The Chinatown Plaza strip mall was conceived by Taiwanese American James Chih-Cheng Chen and opened in February 1995 at the corner of Spring Mountain and Wynn; it has 85,000 ft (26,000 m) of space and was designed by Simon Lee in a style inspired by Tang Dynasty buildings. Chen called it “America’s first master-planned Chinatown”. The plaza was funded by JHK Investment Group, Inc., which Chen had formed with two high school classmates: Henry Chen-Jen Hwang and K.C. Chen (no relation). James Chen, an emigrant from Taiwan who arrived in Los Angeles in 1971 with $30, saw a demand for Asian food and restaurants: “I see so many Asian tourists here [in Las Vegas], but I see no Asian business people. They’re happy with everything in Las Vegas except the food.” Sharon Hwang, Henry’s daughter, recalled her father was similarly inspired by stories he would hear from tourists returning from Las Vegas to Los Angeles: “… We figured all the Southern California Chinese, they love to come to Vegas, gambling; that was the thing. So they would come average, I would say, once or twice a year at least. But everybody’s thing was, there’s no Chinese food; there’s no good Chinese food in Las Vegas, nothing authentic, just nothing really. It was kind of a joke almost in California.” By 1996, the plaza was visited by approximately 3,000 to 5,000 daily, and Chen was planning to open the Far East Trade Center later that year for manufacturers to exhibit their goods.
Clark County designated Chinatown Plaza as the Asian Pacific American Cultural Center on May 7, 1996, the first official recognition of the new district. Nevada Governor Kenny Guinn officially designated the 3 mi long (4.8 km) district along Spring Mountain from Las Vegas Boulevard to Rainbow Boulevard as Chinatown in October 1999 and it continues to grow as the Asian population in Las Vegas expands rapidly. The Chinatown area has gained much popularity, receiving national attention in a 2004 article by The Wall Street Journal. Huffington Post classifies the Chinatowns in Las Vegas, Atlanta-Chamblee, Dallas-Richardson, and North Miami Beach as “modern” styled Chinatown, in contrast with the historic core Chinatowns in New York and San Francisco. The Las Vegas Chinatown is pan-Asian in nature instead of being completely Chinese according to the previous source. The official website for the Chinatown Plaza indicates that Spring Mountain Road is the general corridor for the neighborhood.
The history of Chinese population in the Las Vegas Valley shows that the Chinese population remained small throughout most of its history. As a result, a Chinatown could only be created with initiative from entrepreneurs that would in essence fabricate a scenario that came naturally in other large cities that have historically important Chinatowns. According to Bonnie Tsui, Las Vegas’s Chinese population boomed starting from the 1960s and by the 1990s, the Chinese population grew to 15,000 with the majority working in the casino industry. Even as the population grew, the “Chinatown experiment” could not rely on the local Chinese population to create it, but relied on a label on the plaza itself before people knew it was “Chinatown”. In addition, Senator Harry Reid “… ordered a sign to be put up for Chinatown [along Interstate 15]…” but was taken down by the order of the governor of Nevada Bob Miller.
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