 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.
"Little emphasis is placed on the gambling
clubs No cheap and easily parodied slogans
have been adopted to publicize Las Vegas, no
attempt has been made to introduce
pseudo-romantic architectural themes or to
give artificial glamour or gaiety." WPA
Guidebook to Nevada, 1940
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 look-a-likes 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.
Neighborhoods and orientation
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.
Entertainment
There was a time when performing in Las
Vegas represented the absolute pinnacle of
any show-business career. In the early
1960s, when Frank Sinatra's Rat Pack were
shooting the original Ocean's 11 during the
day then singing the night away at the Sands
, the city could claim to be the capital of
the international entertainment industry. It
was even hip.
The money is still there in Las Vegas, as
was shown by the MGM Grand paying Barbra
Streisand a reported $20 million to perform
on Millennium Eve, but the world has moved
on. As the great names of the past fade from
view, few of the individual performers
popular with traditional Vegas visitors are
now considered capable of carrying an
extended-run show. Today's stars, on the
other hand - Celine Dion excepted - don't
want to spend their lives playing Vegas.
Top-selling musicians make quite enough
money from recordings and occasional tours
not to need to spend months at a time in the
desert.
Nonetheless, live entertainment remains a
crucial component of the Las Vegas package,
and the days of the big-budget "spectacular"
are far from over. The tendency nowadays is
to rely on lavish stunts and special effects
rather than global megastars, with the
illusionist-magicians Siegfried and Roy now
into their second decade at the Mirage . A
fair number of old-style Vegas revues are
still soldiering on, but there are more
stimulating contemporary productions than
you might imagine. In particular, the arty
Canadian-based circus/theater troupe, Cirque
du Soleil , has revolutionized attitudes
toward what Las Vegas audiences might be
able to handle. Its two stunning shows,
Mystère at Treasure Island and the
magnificent O at Bellagio , remain the
biggest tickets of all, though the Luxor 's
Blue Man Group has stolen a little of their
avante-garde thunder. To make sure of seeing
one of these big-name shows, especially on a
weekend, it's essential to make reservations
as far in advance as possible; if you're
happy just to see whatever's available,
however, most of the lesser shows are still
selling tickets right up until showtime.
It also looks as though Las Vegas might
finally be getting more into tune with the
musical tastes of the baby-boom generation.
You can still see Tom Jones, Englebert
Humperdinck, and Wayne Newton if you're in
town at the right time, and lots of
unfashionable names from the Seventies and
Eighties linger on, but the Hard Rock,
Mandalay Bay , and Aladdin are all now
showcasing the biggest names in contemporary
rock, reggae, blues, and soul.
We've reviewed a representative
cross-section of Las Vegas shows. All take
place on the Strip ; several of the downtown
and off-Strip casinos have showrooms, but
with the Rio repeatedly misfiring, none
currently features anything of interest.
Note that the entertainment scene was
especially hard hit by the post-September 11
economic downturn. Several shows closed,
while others reduced their frequency and/or
ticket prices. All the listings here are
therefore even more subject to change than
usual.
As for what the future may hold, the Cirque
du Soleil will certainly remain at the
forefront. They're said to be developing a
show for Steve Wynn's Le Reve , set in a
Himalayan village where all the children
aged under eleven can fly, and another for
New York-New York , with a fire theme to
match O's water motif. The biggest single
project of all, however, is the Colosseum at
Caesars Palace , intended to draw four
thousand people per night to watch Celine
Dion.
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