Nostalgia Street Rods is somewhat known among us Las Vegas locals as being a hidden gem in the Valley. Although it might not make it to the top of tourist’s lists of places to check out while in town, it still has a very good reputation for those who are interested in cars.

In between my back-to-back hours of work, I decided to squeeze in a break and get some fresh air. The weather has been scorching hot recently and not too many other people have been out and about lately, so I figured now would be a decent opportunity to finally make my way over to the industrial area near the Boulder Junction neighborhood to check out the museum and car collection while it’s not that busy.

Overall, I was pleasantly surprised. There were only two other people in my tour group—they were a couple who generally kept to themselves—so it ended up being a very private and personal tour experience. I paid US$20 for general admission, but it felt like I got lucky and almost got the equivalent of a one-on-one tour that would’ve gone for US$50.

There were two sections to Nostalgia Street Rods, the museum and the automobiles. The museum was the smaller section, housed inside a single very large room, and had a lot of memorabilia. Most of it was centered around media and pop culture, but there were also some interesting historical Las Vegas relics. I was especially satisfied with the high volume of music-related items to see. The tour guide pointed out that a lot of care was taken to verify the authenticity of everything on display.

The main section of the experience was the vehicles. There were multiple rooms and warehouses of cars, in addition to larger vehicles being parked out­side in the lot. One aspect of the automobiles I found nice was that there was a breadth of condition of the exhibits. In simpler terms, car museums u­su­al­ly only have very well-maintained and polished cars, and even older cars have been restored to a pristine condition. However, even though Nos­tal­gia Street Rods had a lot of those, it also had a bunch of vehicles that had clearly been used and abused and milked of their functionality, and it was nice to see the more practical and realistic side of the vehicles as well.

I took a lot of photographs, so I decided to split it up into two blog posts—this one contains specimens from the museum, and the subsequent one will have photos of the automobiles and other vehicle-adjacent items.