Why are so many downtown businesses expanding uptown? In a word, opportunity

Globe Salon has been in business for 18 years. For 10 of those years, it has operated out of the Soho Lofts high-rise at the corner of Charleston and Las Vegas boulevards. Globe’s downtown space is as modern as they come — high ceilings, sleek glass fixtures — and its hospitality is pure old-school Vegas: hot towels, shampooing stations with Italian-made massage chairs and staffers trained to the point they could easily run salons themselves.

You could drop Globe into Los Angeles or New York City and it wouldn’t seem remotely out of place, which makes it all the more extraordinary that its co-owners, Staci Linklater and James Reza, chose downtown Las Vegas — and at a time when downtown’s bankability was anything but assured, back when people’s idea of the city core was more Mad Max than Manhattan. Getting people to Globe, back then, took convincing.

“We’re pioneers downtown,” Linklater says. “We faced a lot of misconceptions about downtown’s parking problems, its homelessness, its general safety. We’ve combated all of that.”

“We have a lot of guests who come to us … who are already urbanites in their mindset,” Reza says. “Maybe they moved here from New York or San Francisco and they don’t harbor any fear, because they know what a real big city’s challenges are. They come to our downtown and say, “Oh, this isn’t a problem at all.”

“But the idea of going somewhere that seems a little less challenging puts a smile on my face,” Linklater says.

That “somewhere” is the west side. Later this year, Globe will open a second location just outside of Summerlin, in a recently remodeled shopping center at the intersection of Charleston and Rampart boulevards. And as it happens, Globe is part of a wave of downtown businesses opening second locations in the rapidly expanding west and southwest: They fol-