I went down to The Strip to catch the New Year’s festivities.

The only words that can really be used to describe the Las Vegas Strip on NYE is … complete and utter chaos.

This Vegas New Year crowd is second only to NYC’s Times Square in numbers, and frankly, I demand a recount.

I have been to Times Square many times on New Year’s Eve. I used to take the F train to Rockefeller Center, and then walk over to the square and watch the ball drop.

The last time I did this was when 1999 turned into 2000, and the new century dawned. I figured that the new century was a good last time to do Times Square.

And last night was a good last time to do The Strip on New Year’s Eve.

It was always extremely crowded in Times Square, but the New Year’s vibe in NYC and Las Vegas are complete and polar opposites. They are not even remotely comparable.

NYC is always very jovial and more often than not people are very friendly to each other. They may be drunk, but 99% of the time they are happy drunks.

The Vegas Strip is downright hostile. People fight and argue as much as they celebrate with each other. People are drunk, but they are often falling down, mean drunk. I typically don’t dig hanging out on The Strip on NYE. When I am in a hotel room or some private place, it’s cool … but it’s not much fun down on the street.

The cops in NYC will typically laugh and joke with you. The Las Vegas Metro Police yell and scream at you pretty much constantly.

But I went anyway. I have a horribly sprained ankle (which is 10x worse now), but I still jumped on the Monorail and made my way down. I got off at the Harrah’s Station because it was mid-strip and had a marquee.

Once I emerged from the casino and onto the street, the first thing I saw was cops breaking up two fights. Nice.

I stepped out into a group of “gangstas”.

As I was walking through, some 19-ish black girl rolled her neck, waved her finger, and declared “Oh no … don’ chu even think ’bout trying to come through here white boy”. Then she screamed to her boyfriend “Hey Devante’ (or Demetrius or something like that) … this white boy thinks he’s getting through here!”. Devante’ (or Demetrius) just looked at me and turned back around. He didn’t seem to be as upset by my presence as his ho’, so I just walked through as she was animatedly making the case to her friends as to why they should beat the shit out of me.

I didn’t say anything to any of them, or do anything to them … so I really don’t know where the anger came from. Maybe they thought I was going to hang out in the spot they had staked out, but I really had no intent of ringing in the New Year with the Rollin’ Compton Crips.

For whatever reason, there is always a heavier “thug” element here than there is in NYC.

Once I had gotten about 200 feet further south, it seemed that I was out of gang turf. I was now in completely-drunk-honky-land.

There was actually a large mix of everyone. One really drunk (and possibly crazy) dude came up to a cop and started shouting “Fuck You!” repeatedly in his face. I kid you not. I actually caught the very last bit of this exchange in the video above. You can see the cop yelling at the guy as he started backing off into the crowd. I didn’t want to get the camera out until I had staked a spot because it would have been quickly crushed given the amount of bumping I had to endure to get out onto the sidewalk and street. I wish I had gotten the exchange from the beginning because it was just bizarre.

Just angry, fighting people for the first 5 minutes I was there.

As it drew closer to midnight, people seemed to chill out. They started breaking out into song and cheers spontaneously. That was cool, but the vibe on The Strip was still very tense and chaotic compared to Times Square.

There were many characters as usual, and even a contingent of people trying to convert others to Jesus throughout the whole thing. Devante (or Demetrius) probably shot them.

I got to talking with people around me, and they seemed sort of happy, but tentative.

I talked to probably 50 or so people from all over the country, and most of them were really cool and just wanted to have a good time … but only a few of them seemed 100% comfortable.

One guy remarked that he thought that Harrah’s could do better with its large marquee screen , and I agreed. Throughout the fireworks, they displayed ads instead of something actually relevant to New Year’s. They should have made something special for the monitor, but it was just the usual ads for Rita Rudder, Total Rewards, etc.

One thing they did do is display a digital countdown.

And it was odd. They counted down from 30 to the New Year twice. As you can see from the video. The crowd was a little confused. They had two New Year countdowns in the span of one minute.

The fireworks had already started, and we did another 30 second countdown. You can see it in the video. I don’t know what happened there.

I could only see a portion of the fireworks on The Strip. As everyone knows, unless you can get a room on a hight floor with a great Strip view (for $1,000) … the fireworks are always best viewed Off-Strip.

After 11pm it was so cold that I could barely operate the camera, and by 12:30am, I literally could not feel my hands at all, nor could I operate the camera anymore.

I tried to made my way back to the Harrah’s Station, and almost didn’t make it home.

The cops had set up a “pedestrian roadblock” and were doing key checks to get back into the casinos.

Cop: Do you have a room key?

Me: No, I am going to the Monorail.

Cop: You can only get into casinos if you have a room key.

Me: You can only get to the Monorail through casinos.

The cop looked completely confused as in “What’s a Monorail?”, and after 10 seconds contemplating the situation, he realized that his police training had never addressed this issue, so he said “Go ahead”. I was lucky. One of the more surly cops probably would have shot me … because I am pretty sure that the LVMPD handbook states “When in doubt, shoot.”.

This is a situation that the Monorail people need to address before urging people to “take the Monorail to the festivities!”

People who do this may not be able to get home from the festivities.

This also might explain why the Monorail was not very crowded. People probably couldn’t get to it after the fireworks unless they had an understanding and/or confused cop.

I’m also shocked that they would turn people away from a casino, but they did exactly this.

It’s fun when you are looking down from a room, a club, a rooftop, a balcony, etc … but unless you are completely blitzed and don’t care where you are, The Strip is simply not fun on New Year’s Eve in my humble opinion. It never has been for me, and last night sort of underscores why that is.

I did appreciate the company I had there last night as I did encounter many very cool people, but that is my last NYE on The Strip.

It’s quite a bit of hassle for little more than chaos, and with the street closures, long lines, and casino entry restrictions … you can’t fully enjoy the city.

Anyway, Happy New Year.

More photos from NYE:

http://www.vegasrex.com/photos/2008-new-years-eve-on-the-las-vegas-strip/