LAS VEGAS

Las Vegas is so saturated with the aura of myth that it is difficult to separate fantasy from reality, even for people who are frequent visitors. Decades of hype and boosterism have created associations linked to our most deeply embedded American dreams: get-rich-quick schemes, the "Wild West," gangsters, Hollywood glitz, glamorous romance, hot entertainment, and twenty-four/seven action. Never mind that these associations work principally through slight-of-hand illusions, Americans have made Las Vegas the premier tourist destination since the 1960s, only to be surpassed recently by Orlando, Florida. At the turn of the twentieth century, over 30 million visitors came to the region a year, with about half of them flying into McCarran International Airport, the tenth busiest in the nation. Always prone to cycles in the nation's economy, tourism was down somewhat after the year 2000, but it remained healthy enough to support the relentless construction of newer and bigger gambling resort-casinos. Gross gambling revenues were more than $6 billion at the turn of the twentieth century, and eager visitors to the area spent an additional $20 billion on hotel, food, entertainment, and other expenses. This is not at all bad for a place that is located in one of the most forbidding deserts on our planet, with daily summer temperatures well into the hundreds. Every drop of water, each piece of produce and meat or fish, and all the other "necessities" of life, except for oxygen itself, must be shipped in from places outside the region.

Despite the desert surroundings, Las Vegas has always been a stopping-off point for travelers; its name means "the meadows" in Spanish. Natural springs bubbling water from underground aquifers created an oasis in a hostile climate. Antonio Armijo, a Spanish trader, found the verdant site in 1829 while searching for a direct route to California from New Mexico. Gold strikes during the 1860s in the area drew the first horde of "get-rich-quick" schemers to the area only to witness the towns they built go bust a few years later when the easy pickings ran out. Yet Las Vegas itself hung on. Banking on its reliable supply of fresh water, the town was converted into a provisioning place with lodging and a general store that prospered. By the 1900s, when the immense infrastructure project that was the transcontinental railroad came west, an entrepreneur by the name of William Clark established a railroad that linked up with the Union Pacific's main line out of Salt Lake City, Utah, and the tracks at San Pedro, California, outside Los Angeles. The Las Vegas site owned by Clark and his associates became a rest stop along the way to Salt Lake City. Lodging and provisioning remained its economic base, as in a sense it continues to do so today, along with the spectacular addition of casino gambling.

There have been many phases of growth and change in the region since that time. Tourism preceded the exploitation of casino gambling as an attraction. Las Vegas would have always remained a small town except for the construction in the late 1920s of the largest dam in the United States across Boulder Canyon just southeast of Las Vegas on the Colorado River. This project, later named for President Herbert Hoover, injected millions of government dollars into the region, creating thousands of jobs at a time when the rest of the country was suffering from an economic catastrophe. Because of government spending, Las Vegas became a boomtown in the 1930s, and it has remained so. With thousands of workers pouring into the site, Las Vegas businesspeople expanded their hotel and gambling operations. Later, during World War II, the federal government helped out again by subsidizing munitions plants in the area and by building one of the largest air force bases in the country, Nellis AFB.

The Birth of Modern Las Vegas

Popular myth, reinforced by Hollywood films, attributes to mobster Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel the vision that created modern-day Las Vegas. This story is incorrect. In the 1940s, the real estate entrepreneur Thomas Hull introduced the concept of the "resort" hotel to the area, following his success at developing similar places in southern California. Architect Wayne McAllister helped create a unique, Southwest style of resort—with rooms wrapping around an open court and pool area—that influenced resort hotel development across the country. Later, during the Christmas season of 1941, Siegel opened the luxurious Flamingo Hotel, also designed by McAllister. Initially a famous flop, the Flamingo prospered in the 1950s and helped induce more venture capital to expand the gambling resort-casino base of the area. Significantly, the Flamingo Hotel, as well as many others built after the 1940s, was located outside the city limits of Las Vegas on what is now known as the Strip, aka, Las Vegas Boulevard. Since that time, it has technically been Clark County, then, with its famous Strip casinos, that has eclipsed the city of Las Vegas itself as the gambling mecca of the nation.

From these beginnings, the Las Vegas region has undergone a series of transformations always resulting in an expansion of its draw as a tourist and leisure haven. During the 1960s classic Las Vegas emerged by realizing Bugsy Siegel's particular vision—the merging of Hollywood and show business glitz with casino gambling. At the Sands Hotel, Frank Sinatra's "rat pack"—consisting of Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford, and Joey Bishop—defined Las Vegas–style entertainment. However, it was really at the Sahara Hotel, just up the Strip to the north, where Louie Prima and Kelly Smith (along with their gifted saxophonist Sam Butera) created the "lounge act," that singular form of free, late-night Vegas entertainment that was practically extinct by 2004; that "act" helped colonize nighttime as a common period of activity. Downtown, in the city center, the venerable "Wild West" casinos such as Binion's Horseshoe and the Fremont drew in capacity crowds of gamblers because of their friendly house odds at table games. The no-frills, "tiny," 300-room Binion's still hosts the increasingly popular World Series of Poker every year.

By the 1970s, Las Vegas was the premier tourist destination in the United States. Well-known casinos such as Caesars Palace, the Sahara, the Alladin, the Stardust, and the Frontier, along with the Flamingo and the Sands (many of which were located on the Strip in Clark County), packed people in at capacity. The Desert Inn innovated first-class eighteen-hole golf in Las Vegas and became an unparalleled luxury resort. Yet, all of these hotel casinos were of modest size compared to the giant resorts that were to come, although the range of up to 2,000 rooms was the envy of tourist resorts around the world.

The Mega-Resorts Take Over

During the 1980s a new player, Steve Wynn, entered the scene. His vision involved pushing the limits of extravagance and capacity, and he built the first of Las Vegas's "mega-resorts." His Mirage hotel casino, completed in 1989, boasted 3,000 rooms set on 100 acres with an eighteen-hole golf course, tennis courts, and many dining alternatives. Along with changing the scale of Las Vegas tourist destinations forever, Wynn also solidified the essential relationship between the mega-resorts and the role of theming embedded in architectural forms as a means of attracting visitors. His Mirage amplified the always popular "tropical paradise" resort motif with a white tiger display in the lobby, a $14 million dolphin pool habitat on the grounds, and, directly outside, a simulated tropical island and lagoon with a faux exploding volcano that erupted nightly every fifteen minutes. Passersby walking on the Strip could not avoid being attracted by the spectacle of flames, sound, and light that did more than anything else to announce a new elaboration of the always excessive, ultra-hyped Las Vegas style.

By the twenty-first century, Las Vegas reigned supreme as the hotel capital of the world, in addition to being its premier casino gambling mecca. The MGM Grand, Las Vegas's first billion-dollar casino, boasted the Earth's largest capacity with over 5,000 rooms, and new resorts rivaling it, such as Mandalay Bay, Treasure Island, and the new Aladdin, were also constructed on the Strip. To make room for the mega-resorts, many of the old-school Vegas casinos were torn down—the land they sat on was far more valuable than the buildings themselves. Las Vegas also saw other billion-dollar-plus buildings constructed by rivals Steve Wynn, who built the luxurious Bellagio, and Sheldon Adelson, who constructed the spectacularly themed Venetian almost directly across the street from the Bellagio. Theming, too, became the principal means of distinguishing one prodigious project from another: New York–New York simulated Manhattan; the Paris Hotel and Casino simulated Paris; the Venetian reproduced a Hollywood set simulation of Venice, Italy, that included a version of its famous canals; the Luxor simulated a Hollywood version of ancient Egypt; the Excalibur simulated King Arthur's England.

The Las Vegas region is a pastiche of tourist attractions that operate seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. Destinations continually reinvent themselves according to shifting market needs. During the economic slump in the early 1990s, for example, some casinos countered the "Sin City" image by transforming themselves into family-oriented destinations. Circus-Circus, always a family place, added a five-acre, $90 million amusement park in 1993. Soon after, the MGM Grand opened with a thirty-three-acre theme park featuring amusement rides and Universal Studios—style Hollywood back-lot attractions. As the economy picked up and the dot.com frenzy hit the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, family emphasis disappeared and casino resorts aimed for both young adults and established middle-agers with money. So-called "fine dining," dance clubs, even art exhibits such as the multimillion-dollar collection once viewable at Steve Wynn's Bellagio were added to the mix. The old Sahara Hotel was renovated to include a NASCAR theme to attract auto racing enthusiasts, and top entertainers from around the world, such as Celine Dion, were ensconced in showrooms that catered to the "after-hours" crowds, while golfing remained as popular as ever and available on several new PGA-approved courses.

The Dark Side of Las Vegas

There is, of course, a downside to the Las Vegas experience. Family assets are lost at the gambling tables. Children are told to hang out at video arcades by neglectful parents intent on spending hours gambling; in the late 1990s, at least one such child was murdered in a horrific case that drew national headlines. Despite over a decade of living under the specter of AIDS, prostitution and the sex trade in general flourish in and around the city. Las Vegas has the highest suicide rate in the country and the highest high school dropout rate. Its environmental concerns include waste from nuclear explosions in nearby Yucca Flats, poor air quality due to automobile smog, extensive pesticide and fertilizer use that threatens the quality of the water supply, cigarette smoke hazards in the casinos, and the general encouragement by resort operators of excessive eating, drinking, and gambling. Despite these problems, Las Vegas remains, after Orlando, Florida, the most successful tourist destination in the United States. Furthermore, unlike other places, it stands apart as a cultural experience that does not mirror our mundane, everyday tastes in fantasy forms, such as Disneyworld, but, instead, celebrates what we know is usually forbidden—especially the risk taking and often reckless activity of legalized gambling.

See also: Atlantic City, Card Games, Commercialization of Leisure, Gambling.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bowers, Michael Wayne. The Sagebrush State: Nevada's History, Government, and Politics. Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press, 1996.

Castleman, Deke. Las Vegas. Oakland, Calif.: Fodors Travel Guides, 1996.

Goodman, Robert. The Luck Business: The Devastating Consequences and Broken Promises of America's Gambling Explosion. New York: The Free Press, 1995.

Gottdiener, Mark, et al. Las Vegas: The Social Production of an All-American City. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999.

Hess, Alan. Viva Las Vegas: After-hours Architecture. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1993.

Moehring, Eugene P. Resort City in the Sunbelt: Las Vegas 1930-1970. Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press, 1989.

Mark Gottdiener