Shimmering from the desert haze of
Nevada like a latter-day El Dorado, Las Vegas is the
most dynamic, spectacular city on earth. At the start
of the twentieth century, it didn't even exist; at the
start of the twenty-first, it's home to well over one
million people, with enough newcomers arriving to need
a new school every month.
Las
Vegas is not like other cities. No city in
history has so explicitly valued the needs of visitors
above those of its own population. All its growth has
been fueled by tourism, but the tourists haven't spoiled
the "real" city; there is no real city. Las
Vegas doesn't have fascinating little-known neighborhoods,
and it's not a place where visitors can go off the beaten
track to have more authentic experiences. Instead, the
whole thing is completely self-referential; the reason
Las Vegas boasts the vast majority of the world's largest
hotels is that around thirty-seven million tourists
each year come to see the hotels themselves.
Each
of these monsters is much more than a mere hotel, and
more too than the casino that invariably lies at its
core. They're extraordinary places, self-contained fantasylands
of high camp and genuine excitement that can stretch
as much as a mile from end to end. Each holds its own
flamboyant permutation of showrooms and swimming pools,
luxurious guest quarters and restaurants, high-tech
rides and attractions.
The
casinos want you to gamble, and they'll do almost anything
to lure you in; thus the huge moving walkways that pluck
you from the Strip sidewalk, almost against your will,
and sweep you into places like Caesars Palace . Once
you're inside, on the other hand, the last thing they
want is for you to leave. Whatever you came in for,
you won't be able to do it without crisscrossing the
casino floor innumerable times; as for finding your
way out, that can be virtually impossible. The action
keeps going day and night, and in this windowless -
and clock-free - environment you rapidly lose track
of which is which.
Las
Vegas never dares to rest on its laurels, so
the basic concept of the Strip casino has been endlessly
refined since the Western-themed resorts and ranches
of the 1940s. In the 1950s and 1960s, when most visitors
arrived by car , the casinos presented themselves as
lush tropical oases at the end of the long desert drive.
Once air travel took over, Las Vegas opted for Disneyesque
fantasy, a process that started in the late 1960s with
Caesars Palace and culminated with Excalibur and Luxor
in the early 1990s.
These
days, after six decades of capitalism run riot, the
Strip is locked into a hyperactive craving for thrills
and glamour. First-time visitors tend to expect Las
Vegas to be a repository of kitsch , but the casino
owners are far too canny to be sentimental about the
old days. Yes, there are a few Elvis impersonators around,
but what characterizes the city far more is its endless
quest for novelty . Long before they lose their sparkle,
yesterday's showpieces are blasted into rubble, to make
way for ever more extravagant replacements. The Disney
model has now been discarded in favor of more adult
themes, and Las Vegas demands nothing less than entire
cities . Replicas of New York, Paris, Monte Carlo and
Venice now jostle for space on the Strip.
The
customer is king in Las Vegas. What the visitor wants,
the city provides. If you come in search of the cheapest
destination in America, you'll enjoy paying rock-bottom
rates for accommodation and hunting out the best buffet
bargains. If it's style and opulence you're after, by
contrast, you can dine in the finest restaurants, shop
in the most chic stores, and watch world-class entertainment;
it'll cost you, but not as much as it would anywhere
else. The same guidelines apply to gambling . The Strip
giants cater to those who want sophisticated high-roller
heavens, where tuxedoed James Bond lookalikes toss insouciant
bankrolls onto the roulette tables. Others prefer their
casinos to be sinful and seedy, inhabited by hard-bitten
heavy-smoking low-lifes; there is no shortage of that
type of joint either, especially downtown.
On
the face of it, the city is supremely democratic. However
you may be dressed, however affluent or otherwise you
may appear, you'll be welcomed in its stores, restaurants,
and above all its casinos. The one thing you almost
certainly won't get, however, is the last laugh ; all
that seductive deference comes at a price. It would
be nice to imagine that perhaps half of your fellow
visitors are skilful gamblers, raking in the profits
at the tables, while the other half are losing, but
the bottom line is that almost nobody's winning. In
the words of Steve Wynn, who built Bellagio and the
Mirage , "The only way to make money in a casino
is to own one"; according to the latest figures,
85 percent of visitors gamble, and they lose an average
of $665 each. On top of that, most swiftly come to see
that virtually any other activity works out cheaper
than gambling, so end up spending their money on all
sorts of other things as well. What's so clever about
Las Vegas is that it makes absolutely certain that you
have such a good time that you don't mind losing a bit
of money along the way; that's why they don't even call
it "gambling" anymore, but "gaming."
Finally,
while Las Vegas has certainly cleaned up its act since
the early days of Mob domination, there's little truth
in the notion that it's become a family destination.
In fact, for kids, it's doesn't begin to compare to
somewhere like Orlando. Several casinos have added theme
parks or fun rides to fill those odd nongambling moments,
but only ten percent of visitors bring children, and
the crowds that cluster around the exploding volcanoes
and pirate battles along the Strip remain almost exclusively
adult.
It
doesn't take long to come to grips with the physical
layout of Las Vegas. Downtown , slightly southeast of
the intersection of I-15 and US-95, may stand at the
center of an urban sprawl that stretches fifteen miles
in all directions, but it's the legendary Strip , starting
two miles south of downtown, where the main action takes
place. In fact, by no coincidence at all, the Strip
begins at the point where Las Vegas Boulevard leaves
the city limits, and casino owners are therefore not
liable to city taxes.
The
Strip itself consists of the four miles of Las Vegas
Boulevard between the Sahara and Mandalay Bay , and
thus now reaches as far south as McCarran Airport. Almost
every building along the way is a casino, each frantically
clamoring for the attention of the tourists who throng
the road day and night. For the sake of convenience,
it's often loosely divided into the South Strip , from
Mandalay Bay up to the MGM Grand and New York-New York
; the Central Strip , which includes Bellagio, Caesars
Palace and the Venetian ; and the North Strip , from
the Stardust to the Sahara .
Whatever
you might expect, downtown Las Vegas is not a bustling
area where locals go about their business far from the
mayhem of the Strip. Instead, it too is utterly dominated
by casinos. Its centerpiece, the Fremont Street Experience
, is an extraordinary architectural conceit, in which
four blocks of its main thoroughfare have been roofed
over to give it the feel of a theme park rather than
a real city. An unfortunate side effect has been to
make the rest of downtown seem even more derelict and
menacing than before; it is not an area any visitor
should attempt to explore.
In
between the Strip and downtown lie two somewhat seedy
miles of gas stations, fast-food drive-ins, and wedding
chapels, parts of which have been optimistically but
pointlessly promoted as the Gateway District .
Being
closely paralleled by both the I-15 interstate and the
(currently inactive) railroad line, the Strip also serves
as the dividing line between east and west Las Vegas.
The closest attempt to match the success of the Strip
has been along Paradise Road , immediately to the east
and home to the Las Vegas Hilton , the Convention Center,
the Hard Rock , and several popular restaurants. A large
campus to the east of Paradise Road, between Flamingo
and Tropicana avenues, houses UNLV - the University
of Nevada Las Vegas - whose students tend to hang out
on Maryland Parkway , another block east.
Although
the area to the west of the Strip is less susceptible
to generalization, the Rio and the Palms have encouraged
tourists to stray across to the far side of the interstate,
and Decatur Boulevard , especially around Sahara Avenue,
is a thriving shopping district.
City
residents, of course, can distinguish between the demographic
profiles of any number of Las Vegas neighborhoods ,
but tourists spend so little of their time anywhere
other than the Strip or downtown that they can remain
oblivious. Broadly speaking, the northeast and northwest
quadrants of the city are its less affluent areas, while
its most fashionable district is Henderson to the southwest
- ranked in its own right as one of America's fastest-growing
cities - with the new Summerlin development to the east
tipped as a future rival.
