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What Goes Up: Crap Shoot Gambling on the triumph of "taste" in Las Vegas.
The dark side of such indulgence--what in another world might be called waste--is central to the local vibe. Picture battalions of retirees with their plastic cups of quarters, pulling, pulling, pulling on the arms of the gaily tinkling, spinning bandits, kissing their savings good-bye in the vast trickle-up of the post-Reagan American economy. You've worked hard your whole life, now here's your chance to blow it all. The history of contemporary Vegas begins with the prescience of the mob and the flourishing of a culture of semi-legitimated vice in the desert. As the city grew, demanding integration into the routines of the national economy and capital market, a process of continuing mainstreaming began. Within scant years the Mafia was displaced by multinationals in a ritual of investment that offers an ongoing object lesson on the fine line between criminality and business as usual. (Interestingly, the transition was financed by an instrument that itself lay at the outer reaches of legal speculation: junk bonds. If Siegel and Lansky were the avatars of the first Vegas, Steve Wynn and Michael Milken were the geniuses behind its transformation to "legitimate" financing.) Perhaps the most indelible marker of Vegas's evolution from mob-style to MBA-style has been the dynamiting of the classic hotels to make way for the gargantuan corporate models. The burial of their bricks and names surely finalizes this transition, as does the replacement of the glam Miami-esque Modernist stylings of the gangster era with the banal iconographies that mark Vegas today. Whatever one thinks of the mob, their taste had legs--no Eiffel Towers, Cheops Pyramids, or Venice Campaniles for them. The stirring sight of hotels coming down (Wynn throws the switch, thousands cheer, news at 11:00...) is another celebration of temporality, of accelerated depreciation, an incitement to hurry up and bet lest the whole edifice crumble and crash. But the demolition of the hotels signals another cultural ritual of Vegas: potlatch, waste elevated to symbolic exchange. The whole enterprise is psychically sustained not simply by the loopy idea of the commutability of gambling and investment but by the conspicuous spectacle of waste, by blowing up a perfectly good building, by the prodigious burning of kilowatts, by throwing your money down a black hole, by (in Howard Hughes' favorite nightmare) detonating hundreds of A-bombs on your own territory, just down the road. This spirit of waste reproduces itself in a broader urbanistic context. Las Vegas is everything an environmentally well-founded city ought not to be. Located in the heart of the desert, the city consumes over 300 percent more water than its environment provides annually. At 360 gallons a day per capita, it leads the nation in water consumption. Even L.A., the urban poster child for resource hyper-indulgence, consumes a mere 211 gallons per capita, while Tucson, equally parched, uses 160. The rampant demand for water is largely for ornamental and symbolic purposes: 60 percent goes to watering lawns and golf courses. The list of environmental issues facing Vegas is long and includes serious air pollution caused by an inefficient transportation network based almost entirely on cars. Because of this, Las Vegas embodies a pure and powerful version of sprawl. The city's spreading periphery is a remarkably uniform low-density crust of buff-colored ranch houses on quarter-acre lots, punctuated by the usual infrastructure of malls (often with casinos as anchors), schools, and tiny developer-provided green spaces. The city is classically segregated--the most segregated in America, according to some--housing its lowest rung in scraggly ghettoes downtown. It is becoming enclaved and cellularized as well, with gated developments now the norm. In fact, Las Vegas has less public open space than any other major city in America. Like the casinos, the housing developments are dominated by huge corporate entities, including the Bass Brothers and the Howard Hughes Corporation. The latter is building Summerlin, a development at the edge of town that, when it is completed a few years after the millennium, will house 160,000 people, carefully segregated by age and income, in 30 elaborately designed villages. None of that is exactly the point though. Nobody looks to Las Vegas as the solution to our urban questions, but it's certainly a clear statement of the problem. Vegas is assuming the status of our designated city of the future, an extreme example of a place where commercial and cultural desires jockey for new form. And it continues to be the fastest growing one in the country because it offers people what they want: low taxation, affordable housing, a growing job market for both the unskilled and professionals, a retreat from cities seen as dysfunctional (more than half of Vegas's immigrants come from California, yesterday's paradise), and, of course, that ineffable sense of possibility fostered by a town built on chance. There are those who take this dynamism very seriously. Hal Rothman, a historian at the University of Nevada and a leading observer of the town, says that Las Vegas has become the "nation's new capital" because it offers an economic model for the next century, a postindustrial economy completely dominated by its service sector. Already, half the labor force is in "service," and the rest--including 80,000 in the construction trades--work to service them. While other observers see Vegas as a nightmare, Rothman sees a postmodern Detroit, a place where a relatively high wage is paid for unskilled work, the millennial equivalent of the assembly line. To him, even the decline of the multigenerational pattern of casino employment has resulted in a (somewhat perverse) version of the American dream. The old Vegas was--much like the auto industry--the model of modern paternalistic capital, where fathers and daughters dealt cards down the generations. Today, the daughters go to B-school. The increasingly corporate character of everything in Las Vegas has also had a dramatic impact on both the social and the physical feel of the place. The Bellagio, Steve Wynn's $1.6 billion replacement for the Dunes, is a conspicuous example. You enter through cool marble halls lined with Armani, Prada, and other sublime retail. The restaurants are "gourmet." There's an art collection with some very good work and a sumptuously flower-stuffed conservatory. Snaking through it is a line as long as the queue outside the buffet to see the 28 paintings (at $10 a pop, it's a $90 savings over Siegfried and Roy). The new Vegas hotels are all pretty much the same. The architectural default on the Strip is the 35-story, mansardic, Dryvit old-Euro look. Across from the Bellagio, the Paris has been topped out and awaits the completion of the 50-story Eiffel Tower that will serve as its sign. Up the street, the $2.5 billion Venetian resort provides an indistinguishable architectural backdrop to what will soon become a Disney version of Venice and its canals. Already up and running is the Monte Carlo, more quoined and doodadded "good taste." Of course, the paradigm is clear: Las Vegas is being Beverly Hills'd, in homage to that other crucial cultural site, with its shared ethos of gigantic rewards for trivial accomplishments. Vegas is the free-range version of Beverly Hills, where everything is grown incredibly large--5,000-room hotels and gambling floors measured in football fields. As images of lifestyle become one of America's biggest exports, cities from Kuala Lumpur to Moscow hurriedly embrace this flimsy, fickle imagery, throwing up a miasma of knocked-off, cardboard, belle époque crap. Although Las Vegas is exhibit A for the centrifugal model of urban development, it has begun--without deliberation--to challenge its own most endemic behavior. By recent count, the intersection of the Strip and Tropicana Boulevard attracts over 300,000 pedestrians a day, which is an astonishing number in a town designed strictly for cars. With more than 100,000 hotel rooms clumped in a relatively small area, and burgeoning "attractions" offered by each hotel, Vegas is developing its own style of flanerie, where visitors stroll up and down the Strip, taking in the urban landscape. Such walks can be hard-won affairs. I recently hiked the length of the Strip, from the Tropicana to Glitter Gulch, and found it a less than elevating experience. Most of the action is on the southern end, where 50 years of recycling and upscaling have created a Manhattan-style real estate market. But even here, despite billions of dollars invested in every block, throngs ready to walk from casino to casino, and generally benign weather (at least at night), you fear to tread because there's simply no place to do it. Vegas actually lacks a continuous, negotiable sidewalk along the Strip. Constantly interrupted by parking lots, diverted around driveways, never shaded by trees, and often narrowed to no more than the width of the curb, the Strip's sidewalks are a pedestrian's nightmare. A number of explanations are offered, including the desire to discourage circulation between competing casinos and corporate contempt for the very idea of a public realm. Whichever you prefer, Las Vegas is an incredible advertisement for the selfishness of capital. The city has the means--both fiscal and physical--for another transformation, as dramatic as any so far. The kind of density that makes casino interiors so exciting as both place and spectacle has yet to find form in the space between interiors. But to the extent that the Stripscape is designed at all, it's done building by building, as a series of pictures to be contemplated from the window of a passing car. The streets of Vegas await the press of collectivity, something the owners--and the genius loci--continue to resist. And this horror of the public in any role but suckers is the failure of the town. |
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