While most Vegas visitors focus on gambling and nightlife, others seek cultural enrichment. Luckily, Sin City boasts numerous unique museums to satisfy this hunger for knowledge and discovery.
Bring back some Vegas memories at the Neon Museum Boneyard with guided tours that include fun anecdotes. Most passes include these enlightening tours.
1. Neon Boneyard
Established in 1996, The Neon Museum is a non-profit organization committed to collecting, preserving and studying iconic Las Vegas signs for educational, historic, arts and cultural enhancement. Situated within a restored La Concha Motel lobby with an atomic blast-shaped lobby.
At its nearly two-acre campus in North Las Vegas, The Boneyard Museum features the main collection – where tours can be taken – as well as its Visitors’ Center housed in the former La Concha Motel lobby and its North Gallery which houses more rescued signs for display.
Docent-led tours are offered daily. Due to high demand and frequent ticket sell outs, tickets should be purchased in advance for an hour long experience. Children six and under receive complimentary admission. Plus ticket holders can add Brilliant Jackpot! – a 45-minute light show in the North Gallery – to enhance their visit.
2. Mob Museum
At this museum that explores American history from a darker angle, explore vintage world of organized crime and ongoing conflicts between mob bosses and law enforcement agencies. With interactive features like Crime Labs, firearm training simulators and even an exhibition that showcases Prohibition history from both sides, this museum provides an unforgettable journey.
Enjoy a self-guided or guided tour through the museum at your own pace, or contact an expert guide for a guided experience. Among the museum exhibits’ many highlights are a 100 year-long wall of infamy covering Mob history; an original electric chair; grisly weapons; personal belongings of famous gangsters such as Al Capone, Bugsy Siegel and Eliot Ness; personal effects from money laundering operations, murder for hire contracts and espionage crimes; among others.
3. Bodies: The Exhibition
Visitors seeking a deeper understanding of how their bodies function can visit Bodies: The Exhibition. This in-depth display features real body systems including those for skeletal, muscular, circulatory, digestive, respiratory and more – giving guests an in-depth view into these processes that make up their skeleton, muscles, circulatory system and digestive organs.
This exhibit employs a plasticization process known as plastination to preserve cadavers from decaying, providing guests with unparalleled views into human anatomy and lifestyle choices — for instance displaying healthy lung tissue next to one damaged from years of smoking for comparison purposes.
A spokesperson for the exhibit claims the cadavers are donated by China and come from hospitals that have declared them unclaimed, yet critics argue the exhibit should be more transparent about its sources.
5. Museum of Moving Images
The Museum of Moving Images is an institution unique in America that comprehensively explores film, television and digital media culture – from its art, history, technology and media formats – through artifacts collected worldwide to screenings of hundreds of movies every year as well as providing educational programs.
Behind the Screen offers visitors an immersive experience into the creative process by following every step in creating and showing movies, from nineteenth-century optical toys through building grand cinema palaces and digital technology impacting editing and production design.
At its breathtaking facility in a tree-lined avenue in a neighborhood where most New Yorkers associate Greek food, its striking facility – covered with glass and steel like something out of science fiction filmmaking – will astonish guests.
