By james art Liam Dwyer’s restaurant, 7th & Carson, was in its first few years of operation as a successful new eatery, blocks from the Fremont East neighborhood in downtown Las Vegas, when the COVID-19 pandemic changed his expectations, his business model and his downtown neighborhood.
Dwyer recalled working with other restaurant owners to agree on staggered hours — his restaurant pivoted to serving brunch and selling produce like a corner market. Shortly after the worst of the pandemic, a year of nearby road construction slowed business again.
All the while, he applied for every loan and grant to keep the cash flowing. That’s where he was able to count on the Downtown Vegas Alliance for help.
The nonprofit business league represents stakeholders in the dozen or so neighborhoods that make up Las Vegas’ urban core. Dwyer said he reached out to them for information and support in finding employee retention grants, Payroll Protection Program (PPP) loans and more.
“It was like, ‘Here’s where you need to go, here’s what you need to do,'” Dwyer said. “If I was in trouble and hit a road block, I would call and they would point me in the right direction.”
That kind of support is Audrey Hooper’s vision for DVA, of which she became executive director in August. Hooper, a downtown business owner, resident and former event manager at Zappos for 13 years, said he wants to focus the organization’s ability to “cross-pollinate” the community of business owners in roughly a dozen different downtown neighborhoods.
“Downtown is the first area that I’ve ever felt like there’s a lot of community — you get a sense of what community is all about,” Hooper said. “That’s why I really wanted to get involved with DVA, to be able to really bring what I feel and know is at the center, help a lot more people feel that way and connect more people that way.”
Creating a voice at the center
DVA was founded in 2008 when business operators and property owners wanted to push for a shared vision in the area.
Joe Woody, chief financial officer of El Cortez, said the Fremont East hotel-casino is one of the founding partners. He recalled how stakeholders in various areas of downtown — those building the Smith Center, property owners in what would soon become Fremont East and others — felt they needed a common organization that “brought it all together.”
Woody said the benefits of the alliance are focused on networking and information sharing. He said city and business leaders could meet regularly, learn about changes at the government level and formulate a unified response.
“Instead of having all these property and business owners attend the (government) meeting, now you can have one voice,” Woody said. “You can have someone like Andrew Simon (CEO of Fremont Street Experience) on our board, he’s present and reflects the voice of the entire area.”
In addition, the information is filtered back to approximately 85 members of the organization. Dwyer said he learned about plans around town through DVA newsletters, mixers and casual conversations.
“I’m a hands-on operator, I spend most of my time on site building my business,” he said. “I don’t have time to go to a lot of meetings to get all this information, so DVA is where I get most of the information that helps me.”
Connecting downtown businesses
Memberships range from $400 a year for non-profits to $7,500 a year for executive memberships, usually chosen by larger downtown businesses. Current steering committee members include Circa, Downtown Grand, CIM Group (the real estate owners behind Downtown Grand) and the law firm Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck LLP.
Hooper said connecting businesses with each other is also an important part of her goals for the group. Recent efforts include connecting members with vendor opportunities during the Neon City Festival, the new free concert and food festival in downtown Las Vegas that will be held during Formula 1 race week. She said Medellin Empanadas, a Colombian restaurant based at the North Las Vegas Premium Outlets, has secured a vendor spot in the food truck area of the Fremont Street Experience festival through connections it made in the group’s small business incubator program.
Connections don’t just help small businesses. Woody said El Cortez benefits from its stake in DVA because it can connect the hotel with new business partners, as well as elevate rising stars within the company by bringing them into the alliance.
“It all really comes back to help El Cortez,” Woody said. “We’re a community partner, we’re the voice of Fremont East, and we thrive on that kind of thing. That’s what we like to do, is just to be involved and in the meantime we can keep up with current events.”
Contact McKenna Ross at [email protected]. Follow @mckenna_ross_ on X.