Central, Incline Village, NV

Central is named the way a planner names things: when urban architect Raymond Smith drew up Incline Village for the Crystal Bay Development Company in the early 1960s, this was the hub the whole plan radiated from, and it still is. The Tahoe Boulevard spine carries the town's entire errand life, Raley's to library to recreation center, with the Hyatt's lakeside resort anchoring the shoreline end. The street grid doubles as a founders' ledger. Juanita Drive remembers Art Wood's wife, who endured the snow only until the marriage ended and then went home to Oklahoma City. Housing is the most varied in the village: first-wave cabins, condo clusters built for the ski trade, and a steady crop of rebuilds, all on the flattest ground Incline offers. The Village Green and Incline Beach sit at the neighborhood's lake edge, and this is where IVGID's famous 1968 beach deed pays off daily: the district bought the beaches for $2.1 million with a covenant reserving them for its property owners, a restriction locals still defend like a family heirloom. The cost of centrality is company. Everyone in town passes through, July traffic on Highway 28 backs up, and quiet is not on the menu. What you get instead is the only Incline address where the car can sit parked all weekend.