stripped-down

This is the second time I’ve been to Vegas in one year*. This is either two too many or not nearly enough; risks of excess are appropriate here. The first time I came was in November, when I was still 20 — a mere three months until my 21st birthday, on the cusp of the demographic that Vegas attempts to attract. Now, at 21, I’m able to see this city in new, shimmering, ‘open-all-nite’ light. In fact, you can see the strip lights from everywhere, including my abnormally large hotel window. But then again, that’s always kind of been the point – to be able to see these buildings, these lights, this town of excess, from anywhere and everywhere

Towers shoot up from the cement sidewalks like weeds in a suburban yard. Those same suburbanites – the white mothers and whiter children, kept indoors at the risk of facing reality or worse, sunlight – bask in the artificial glow of hotel signs and show lights. The tangibility of Old Time Vegas is now gone; posters are replaced with TV screens; lights are replaced with…TV screens. The town, resembling a 3D puzzle, has advanced past comfort, disconnecting from all who inhabit it.

There is no end to excess in this town, but that seems to be just how the residents and visitors like it. There is an otherworldly quality to Strip (which is, for all intents and purposes, Las Vegas in its entirety), which is an oddity considering that there is nothing in the town that it is, in itself, original. The Venetian and Paris hotels emulate their respective European locals. New York, New York goes one step further, mimicking a city within our very own country. Even the strip clubs begin to blend together, abandoning any desire for originality (I saw cards littering the ground advertising a new club opening called Assgrab – opening a mere block away form Club Grabbyass).

But I embrace and even, dare I say, adore that tastelessness; the same way you put up with a family relative who drinks one too many white wine spritzers and then gets overly and theatrically anxious about not hearing spoilers. When my family and I visited in November (which was when I had originally planned on writing all this), we were taken on a night tour of the Strip by a man who knew the area well. He showed us the old (MGM Grand, The Flamingo), the new (Wynn Hotel, City Center), the borrowed (extensions of both The Venitian and The Palazzio have been on hold for further construction for over a year now due to an inability to pay back loans – as of now, a start up date is still unknown), and the black and blue (I am almost positive that the hooker I spotted was sporting a black eye and not, as my mom claimed, wearing that “chic raccoon-make-up kids wear now”).

But it wasn’t until we drove further down the strip that I was suddenly surrounded by something I wasn’t expecting: culture. Vegas culture, but a culture nonetheless. There was warmth that resonated from the Golden Nugget and Circus Circus, hotels that were top tier in their prime, but are now resigned to the lesser end of the strip, serving as nothing more than street corners for beaten down (or fashion-savvy) hookers to turn tricks on.

It was tragic, but Old Vegas was where my heart stayed for the remainder of our trip, and the months in between this most-recent excursion. Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to take another trip down there like I would have liked, but it’s haunted me with startling detail.

But slowly, all of Vegas might be following suit, until there is no lesser end of the Strip to speak of. After over twenty-years as one of the fastest-growing metropolises in all of the United States, Las Vegas now faces the highest foreclosure rate of any major city, with the unemployment rate having jumped from 3.8% to 12.3% in just three years.

Sheldon Adelson, who has lost more money during the rigors of the economic collapse than anyone else on this world we call the earth, is the 76-year-old chairman of the Las Vegas Sands Corp., which owns the Venetian hotel, the Convention Center and a plethora of other lavish landmarks. In 2007 and '08, he was the third richest person in the world, with a net worth of $40 billion. By February of 2009, he’d lost $36.5 billion — more than the GDP of half of the countries in the world. That's his crane parked between The Venetian and The Palazzo.

This town is hit hard. You can see it. I guess that’s what happens when you’re a city known for extravagance during a time where extravagance is the problem. But there is something hilariously and appropriately fitting about Vegas’ profligacy. I missed it the first time around; I originally though that it was simply a town that was re-built in its own shallow image. And it is! Where Vegas once took itself perhaps a bit too seriously, new Vegas knows its attraction, and it plays up its grandeur. It’s a town that embraces its superficiality, and I adore it for that.

But now I see a meaning in it. Because the people that ruled Vegas in its heyday — a time where lawlessness meant cutting deals over nightclub dinners and treating your woman of the week a bit too nice — meant something different. The ones who traded pharaoh gold for pinstripes ruled this strip of land, this post-capitalist desert, like the very Roman rulers and Greek gods that these casinos and hotels now pay tribute to. These landmarks serve not simply as extensions of grandeur, but reminders as well. Reminders of better times and perhaps even a self-fulfilling realization that Vegas, like all empires, like a tower of cards, will inevitably collapse.

It’s that self-awareness that makes New Vegas so magnetic a force. Fiji is the only water available here. Floor 13 doesn’t exist in a single hotel. And a 5-year-old casino is actually 25 in strip years. But what this answer to post-countercultural America really does is personify the ever-fleeting idea of that American dream, which is at this point so foggy a phrase that it’s lost all meaning and substance. But it’s rooted here, in the blood of a city that now houses halted construction and casino owners hustling twice as hard. What this city is and has always been built on are bets. Bets that people will want hotels larger and glitzier. Bets that even once we find fiscal equilibrium, our desire for the over-the-top will never falter, and we’ll come back to a city that preaches sin as a virtue. Bets that may prove to be wrong, but the Strip nevertheless goes all in.

I use to think what happened in Vegas, stayed in Vegas. Turns out what happens in Vegas speaks for everything outside of it.


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*By year I mean school year, which for a student is the only official method of measurement.