I Love Las Vegas.
It is one of the most stirring cities in the American imagination, built on the Hoover Dam and gambling.
The Mormons and the Mob helped out too. My earliest memories of Las Vegas are as a pit stop on those family pilgrimages to Disneyland. We would stay at an inexpensive off-strip hotel, cruise the lights, and eat in a buffet.
Maybe my parents would play a few nickel slots. Family fun before Las Vegas started pandering for Mom and Dad and the kiddies with on site day care and dragon slaying.
One of my favorite images of Las Vegas was that swimming pool with the cutouts so you could see the people inside. Las Vegas is a mixture of the potency of the Los Angeles of 40 years ago and the pure venality of the LA of today. Las Vegas has no definable soul, but it is certainly alive, 24 intense hours a day. The Strip is a tribute to money and the service economy. Probably the saddest thing about Las Vegas is the schizophrenic Disneyland/Sodom and Gomorrah quality to it today. Fliers for "adult entertainers" are strewn on the sidewalks leading to roller coaster rides. The city seems to be in conflict between the sin that gave birth to it and the penitence that rears its head cyclically in America. The new prudishness of America has worn down the city, but it is not down for the count yet. There is still a spirit of the outlaw out in the desert. Perhaps its role as the destination for those escaping decaying cities will continue to give it that slightly illicit edge it must maintain.
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The government's crackdown on the mob influence in Las Vegas consisted mostly of changes in laws that favored privately owned casinos. The policies are less about the vigorous prosecution of the criminal element and more about opening the market to publicly held corporations. The large chains, with their formulas that allow them to give the lowest acceptable quality for the best price, focused on attracting families searching for the cheapest vacation possible. Families do not begin to approach the spending on gambling that the high rollers do. By inviting the chain hotel industry to do business in Las Vegas, the government allowed a reduction in the level of quality in service and product. Lower prices forced the hotels to search for ways to increase their margins in a market that was never meant to compete for food and lodging dollars. Without the infusion of cash from gambling, hotels are unable to approach the level of quality in service that was once the benchmark in the competition for visitors. Less mobster image may be better for public relations (even that is disputable), but worse for the bottom line.
Steve Wynn, the man behind Las Vegas shrines The Mirage and its more family oriented but no less extravagant sister, Treasure Island, is due to complete work on Bellagio, a casino catering solely to high stakes gamblers. Las Vegas is getting wise to the con that has been run on it. Wynn, currently in the midst of a libel suit against an author who claims he has ties to organized crime, offers both visions of Las Vegas next door to each other on the Strip. Treasure Island is a theme hotel, offering visitors a pirate battle in front of the hotel, and maintaining the swashbuckling theme throughout the hotel. In room TV plays endless loops of a Disney-esque live-action adventure movie featuring modern day tourists grappling with pirates. The Mirage captures the glamor of Las Vegas. Master illusionists/animal trainers/odd celebrities Sigfried and Roy perform at the Mirage regularly. Wynn stole their services away from Las Vegas institution The Frontier after a particularly vicious bidding war. Both The Mirage and Treasure Island are filled 24 hours a day with wide eyed tourists from the Midwest, not gambling as much as gawking at the spectacle. These hotels, while relative newcomers to the Strip, are among the most popular in Las Vegas. It's as though Wynn is hedging his bets. Give them Disney until the kids go to sleep. Then give them a show. Given the pace at which a new property is erected and destroyed on the Strip, each of these casinos will be radically different places, if not buildings, in 10 years, depending on the whim of each new wave of tourists.
Off the Strip, the residents of Las Vegas build the malls, fast food joints and convenience stores that residents of suburbia are convinced they need. They fled the poor economies of the East coast and the South for jobs as blackjack dealers and valets. They live in their neatly manicured subdivisions with the houses that consist of five floor plans rotated for variety. Further out, in the desert proper, wealthy exiles from the California tax codes get tans, play golf and maintain unlisted numbers. The outskirts have fed on the subsidies from a few miles of asphalt, choked with cars, tour buses and taxis. Those subsidies have fed new businesses wholly unrelated to gambling, but grateful benefactors of it. The city's growth due to gambling means a whole wave of eager consumers, swallowing up the goods and services every community needs. The city is plagued with many of the same issues facing major American cities, but the frontier mind set still applies. Circle the wagons. Residents are convinced they will overcome any problem previously thought insurmountable. It is almost assuredly better than wherever they came from.
(The conflict) Harshly awakened by the sound of six rounds of light caliber rifle fire followed minutes later by the booming of nine rounds from a heavier rifle..But you can't close off the wilderness. He heard the snick of a rifle bolt and found himself peering down the muzzle of a weapon held by a drunken liquor store owner."There's a conflict," he said. "There's a conflict between land and people...The people have to go. They've come all the way out here to make mining claims, to do automobile body work, to gamble, to take pictures, to not have to do laundry, to own a mini-bike, to have their own CB radios and air conditioning, good plumbing for sure, and to sell Time-Life books and to work in a deli, to have some chili every morning and maybe...maybe to own their own gas stations again and to take drugs and have some crazy sex, but above all, above all to have a fair shake, to get a piece of the rock and a slice of the pie and to spit out the window of your car and not have the wind blow it back in your face."
-Stan Ridgway,
"Call of the West".
Visitors have gotten lucky. Or robbed blind.