Everyday Las Vegas: Local Life in a Tourist Town

Las Vegas Becoming

209 E ntering the second decade of the twenty-first century, Las Vegas stands at the brink. This is nothing new for the city that molds itself into whatever attracts the most visitors. Because of such a huge reliance on tourism , however, the city’s economy has suffered disproportionately in the Great Recession. The slumping economy only amplified huge questions locals faced earlier regarding water availability, sense of community, rapid growth, transience, and a movement toward a more economically diverse, less tourism -dependent city. The result is a collective sense of introspection among residents and observers about the future of Las Vegas. Will the city recover— in visitor volume, casino take, construction employment—to a point when growth rates maintain a strong positive trend, and people come again by the thousands to fill all the now-empty homes? Will the foreclosure crisis, and the screeching halt it brought to home construction, force locals to rethink the sprawling urban growth trend of the past six decades? Will Las Vegas become a city of its own, less tied to the Strip and tourism and more rooted in arts, culture, and entertainment options for locals? In returning to Las Vegas several times since completing interviews for this project, I often pondered such questions. In my contemplation I have added another query: What do the characterizations of the city I have described in this book say about how it will react to current circumstances? Predicting the future is as uncertain as a toss of the dice at the craps table, but my observations from a recent winding drive through the valley provide a glimpse into how unchanging elements in the local Las Vegas personality may influence how the city confronts the precipice of its future. a glimpse of reality On a sunny day in January 2011, I drove north on Las Vegas Boulevard and witnessed recent changes to this city of constant flux. CityCenter, the mammoth , multibillion-dollar MGM Resorts complex completed in 2009 at center Strip, is Las Vegas at its booming peak: extravagant, under construction, Las Vegas Becoming C O N C L U S I O N 210 e v e r y d a y l a s v e g a s flashy, and ready for the next stage of life as an upscale, hip, and global resort destination. I think of the project’s ill-fated timing. In planning and early construction of the largest single resort endeavor in Strip history, everything in the city seemed economically perfect. Financing was easily secured, visitor volumes were steadily rising, and tourists were spending massive sums of money on expensive hotel rooms and condos, extravagant shows, and exorbitantly priced meals from celebrity chefs. By CityCenter’s opening, however, all that had changed; the resort struggled with filling rooms, selling condos, and keeping gamblers on the casino floor.1 Passing Bellagio and Caesars Palace on the left, I am reminded what these two properties looked like when I was a teenager. Bellagio replaced the Dunes, and Caesars Palace is barely recognizable (aside from the legacy of a few Roman statue re-creations at the resort’s gateway) with its numerous hotel tower additions that, like CityCenter, represent a more prosperous time. In that same reminiscent attitude I recall how Caesars’ neighbor to the north, the Mirage, was the impetus for the resort and population explosion of the 1990s. Steve Wynn no longer runs that property, but his newest and highly successful ventures at Wynn Las Vegas and Encore another mile north remind me of his continued influence on the city’s rebranding as a high-end, luxury tourism market. In fact, it is unlikely that MGM Resorts would have tried something as extravagant as CityCenter had Wynn Las Vegas been a failure. Wynn’s Encore, ironically, is where my vision of this newest act of the city’s performance ends. Directly across the Boulevard, the former site of the Frontier is abnormally empty, a deserted parcel that was the most expensive tract ever sold in the city and that was supposed to accommodate another swanky high-brow resort.2 Next to it, the stalled and silent construction site of Echelon Place, Boyd Gaming’s attempted foray into the luxury Strip market . Gone are construction cranes that formerly were such a ubiquitous part of the Las Vegas skyline that Nevada historian Guy Rocha gave them the title of “state bird.”3 All that remains is a concrete shell awaiting a rebirth. I continue...