Looking north on Paradise Road, from the corner of Convention Center Drive.

To the left is the site of, and the sign for, the Landmark, which had served as the exterior for the uppermost floors of the Whyte House during Sean Connery's stunt scenes in the 1971 James Bond movie Diamonds Are Forever. To the right is the sign for the newly rebranded (in 2012) Las Vegas Hotel, or LVH, which had opened in 1969 as the International and was known for most of its life as the Las Vegas Hilton; in Diamonds Are Forever, the overview of the Whyte House used the LVH, already the largest hotel in the world at the time, as its lower half, with the upper half drawn/rendered in by hand.

A bit in the distance is the Riviera, another old hotel from the Diamonds Are Forever era and the filming location for a few of the scenes.

But this view is also very telling of the vast changes Las Vegas has gone through since those times. Las Vegas is now a sizable metropolis, and now comes with all the requisite trappings, such as high-rise luxury condominiums, large non-gaming hotels like the Marriott Spring Hill Suites on the left, and public transportation like the Regional Transit Commission bus and the monorail. Population has grown exponentially while at it, and the empty, rural Las Vegas Valley seen in the movie Diamonds Are Forever is now running out of land to build on.