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The new, supercolossal Vegas started with Caesars Palace, which opened in 1966 and is still a touchstone for macro-ornamentation. But it took Steve Wynn, with the Mirage in 1989, followed by Treasure Island and Bellagio, to establish the Vegas Strip as the architecturally most exciting street in the world. Like the old moguls, Wynn and the towns other master builders of Vegas have created dreams that elevate our environment and shape our view of how we fit into it.
The difference is that millions of peons didnt have to go blind or stooped financing Caesars, or the MGM Grand, or Wynns stately pleasure domes. The Vegas entrepreneurs paid for these billion-dollar castles and cathedrals not with money they took from us but with the money they hoped to take from us. And that may give gamblers a sense of duty to matching the wonder. We have to pay for the glamour these moguls have laid out for us. And we will pay. With interest.
Its a privilege to enter these jaunty, lurid evocations of swanker times. They are our Eiffel Tower, our Luxor pyramid, our St. Marks Square. Literally, or nearly so: copies of the old monuments but more so, as a caricaturist exaggerates the features of his subject. They certainly are, as movie theaters were, the grandest, most entertaining architecture of their day. They are both a reductio ad absurdum and an enlargement of more delicate architectural tendencies; but then Las Vegas is built on a mirage, a dream in the desert.
A NOVEL CITY
Las Vegas is the great American fictional city. Its a page-turning novel told in a million lives and 120,000 hotel rooms; an epic movie with casino chips for special effects; a tragedy of addiction and a burlesque with the smoothest showgirls around. Its the town that attracted James Bond, Michael Corleone, Beavis & Butt-head. Its where Robert Redford offered a million bucks for a night with Demi Moore, where Rain Man and Starman got Lost in America. Is Vegas only a movie, a living novel? Does the town even exist? Yes, inside the hopes and greed and need for excess that define us all at our most reckless, most alive moments.
The trick of being a great American city in the 21st century is to match muscle with myth, power with showbiz. New York has the concrete grandeur and Broadway; Los Angeles has the Pacific and Hollywood. (Sorry, Chicago, youve got big shoulders but plain features. Too bad, Houston, youre a launch pad with too much air-conditioning.) Sometimes showbiz is all a city needs to grow from Nowhere to Now! Here!
On the living-room wall at our place is an eight-by-ten-foot map of the United States, manufactured in the 1930s. It has all the major cities of the time, but not Orlando (pop. 27,330), and certainly not Las Vegas (pop. 5,165). Today, each metropolitan area has more than a million inhabitants, plus millions more visitors each year. (By contrast, Atlantic Citys population sank from 66,000 in 1930 to 40,000 in 2000.) How did these two little towns, one too humid, the other too dry, become the top resort destinations in the U.S.? Disney built dream parks over a Central Florida swamp, and Las Vegas is a giant id sprouting from a dry groin — the gaudiest mirage that ever gushed, geyser-like, from the desert.
Or is desert quite the word? Gaze into the horizon from the revolving tower on the 108th floor of the Stratosphere hotel (where a roller coaster winds around the spaceship-shaped aerie). Youll see that this stretch of Nevada is pretty damn ugly: infinities, in every direction, of dry, brownish-gray earth that is too bland to be called dirt, too soiled to be called soil. The carcasses of extraterrestrials are supposed to be housed at Area 51, the famously obscure military installation nearby. But, really, why would UFOs land here anyway? Not for the scenic majesty. The only sensible reason for aliens to alight in this stretch of Nevada is because Las Vegas is near. Theyd come for the love of the game.
Vegas bounty and challenge is to be all things to a certain kind of person: a childlike adult with too much money, itching for risk and sensory overload. Its not enough that the New York-New York hotel evokes Manhattans skyline in its exterior silhouette; it must have — Las Vegas logic demands it — a Coney Island roller coaster one floor above the casino. Visitors stand in line for an hour anticipating their two-minute thrill, even as they stay all night at the craps table, slouched over their ever-smaller pile of chips, still waiting for the salvation of seven. Ambition and sensation are the twin signposts at the last American frontier, and Vegas is their crossroads.
The American dream — to get rich quick or have fun failing — is contagious. It lures the wealthy from Europe, Latin America and especially Asia; the formal parties that opened Bellagio had a nice splash of Chinese and Japanese guests. I know one chic Chinese woman, an ex-movie star and the wife of a real-estate billionaire, who came to Vegas for a weekend in 1994 and won $180,000 at baccarat. I asked her if that was the most shed ever won, and she said yes. And what was the most shed ever lost? Oh, when I lose, she smiled, its my husbands money.
Plutocrat or pauper — or, as often happens in a weekend of gambling, plutocrat, then pauper — visitors to Vegas cling to one equation. Go to O, Cirque du Soleils amazing waterworks show at Bellagio, and you may be culturally enriched, but you know, its a dead-cert bet, that you will be $150 poorer. Spend the same amount of time and money at the slots or the tables, and you could be cleaned out. But you might also clean up. Gambling is the only night out that offers the hope of returning your investment. Ah, hope: its the ultimate mirage in this Wild West town. You can ride the bucking bronco of probability for only so long. You throw the dice but, eventually, the dice will throw you.
A casino operator once explained how the business works: You bring some money, then we give you some money, then you give back our money, and your money, and maybe a some more. Winning is part of the suckers cycle. Its the blast of light, the rush of heroin before the chills and fever enshroud the user.
SLOT CULTURE
Like America of a hundred years ago (and today), a casino is a class society. The high rollers get comped mile-long suites, and other, softer perks, because they bring the big money to the casino and leave a lot of it there. Below them are the $5 and $10 sports at the blackjack, roulette and craps tables. And at the bottom, the proles, the drones, the Walmarts night shift of slot players. In Atlantic City they are blue of hair and wide of girth. In Vegas, most are again female, though the demographic range is wider. But all implicitly follow the casino Code of Behavior. If you win at craps, you may cheer, whoop or kiss the person next to you. At slots, any show of emotion is forbidden; torpor is the rule. The rote manipulation of the slots instills a pall and pallor in their players. You may make a widget one moment, a thousand dollars the next, but its still an assembly line.
At Mohegan Sun in Connecticut and New York, New York in Las Vegas, I saw row upon row of slot-junkies wearing necklaces attached to the machines they were playing. I later learned that at the end of the straps were casino credit cards that tallied the amount spent and offered discounts for heavy gamblers; but the visual metaphor couldnt be more blatant. The players looked tethered to their addiction, not by leg but by neck irons. Or they were on life support, connected to the source of their sustenance by a chain-link IV.
The slots used to be called one-armed bandits, back when each new play required the insertion of coins. Today, that arm is vestigial. You push a button and the tumblers spin. But first you insert money: bills — fives, tens or twenties — or that credit card. The old nickels or quarters are like Weimar deutschmarks, practically worthless; some machines dont accept coins. The machines are computers, of course, and computers work more swiftly; they take your money with an alacrity and efficiency worthy of Deep Blue. House odds say that the more you spend, the more you lose, and the faster you gamble, the quicker youre broke.
For years my mother accompanied us to Sint Maarten and, to be congenial, would go to the casino each evening; blackjack was her slots game. Shed get $5 in quarters and play, with sweet deliberation, for more than an hour. She was rarely wiped out. Thats why most casinos have canned their blackjack slots. I found none among the 2,000 machines at Caesars, a few at New York New York.
Mary plays the machines most other people do: the traditional tumbler-spinning. lucky-7 ones. She starts at the quarter slots, betting three per spin — the standard maximum bet. If my mothers pace was horse-and-buggy, Marys is NASCAR. A typical game, from the pressing of the button to the revelation of the outcome, consumes less than six seconds. Thus, each minute she is investing $7.50; each hour, $450. It happens that, for the past few years, Mary has been lucky at slots. At the end of that hour playing the quarter machines, she may be in the black. And then she moves on to the dollar slots.
Mary thinks she has a system. She goes to a machine that still takes coins, and listens to them drop. If it sounds as though there are few coins in the till, she moves to another machine. If the till sounds almost full, she bets bigger, figuring that its about the pay off. In vain do I explain that machines payoff is utterly arbitrary; that they keep humming their combinations whether or not not theyre being played; that there is no mystic rhythm, no cycle of wins and losses; that winning is an unsustainable fluke. Fat chance I have of convincing Mary shes wrong, since, at every casino weve visited in the last five years, shes come away richer.
THE BIG SHOTS
It is an axiom here that the biggest, nutsiest gamblers are the towns entrepreneurs. From Siegel in the 40s and Howard Hughes in the 60s to Kirk Kerkorian and Wynn in the last decade, they have poured unholy sums into consecutive, contradictory schemes. The town started as a gangsters dream of glamour — and, with variations, it has largely stayed that way. But the hotel owners are never satisfied with what theyve got; or perhaps they dont know what they want. We have the gamblers, now lets woo the family trade. O.K., weve Disneyfied the place, now lets turn it into Fifth Avenue.
Bellagio, which opened in October 1998, was Wynns stab at giving Vegas an instant I.Q. upgrade. He stared at a city groaning with neon, and sang, like Sky Masterston in Guys and Dolls, Slut, be a lady tonight. He spent $1.6 billion on the hotel, including $300 million for a gallery of fine art that held a mere 28 masterpieces and was smaller than some of the hotels suites. Other entrepreneurs tried the high road: a few weeks after the Bellagio premiere, the Rio put up a show called Treasures of Russia, a display of artifacts from the summer homes of the Romanov tsars. In 2001 the Guggenheim Museum franchise moved into two huge rooms at the Venetian, both designed by Rem Koolhaus. The 7,660-sq.ft. gallery displayed works from the Hermitage (another White Russian transplant); the gigantic, 63,700-sq.ft. space opened with a motorcycle exhibition — a thrilling show that was meant to appeal to all tastes, from High Art to Hells Angels.
What could they all have been thinking? That Vegas could lure the type of tourist inclined to visit Manhattan and Europe? That the towns regulars would take a break from the craps tables to be educated, edified? Vegas isnt school; its hooky. This misjudgment of the clientele helped make Wynns empire vulnerable to a Kerkorian takeover; MGM now owns the Mirage, Bellagio and Treasure Island (though Wynn is plotting a newer, more gargantuan Golden Nugget, to open in 2004). And the Guggenheims large gallery closed permanently early this year.
That expensive flirtation with haute culture is, at heart, further evidence of the towns need to mirror, to prefigure, to outdo its customers in taking preposterous risks to get a big payoff. It also demonstrates Vegas almost religious devotion to the new. And a stern renunciation of the old.
In a few endearing ways, Vegas hews to tradition: in the bustier-and-mesh-stocking garb of the waitresses, in the strategic placing of the casino on the long walk from the front desk to the room elevators, above all in the showroom entertainment (which Ill get to in the next column). But theres a heedlessness to the citys sense of its own fabled history. The past has no honored place in a city that believes only in the next roll of the dice.
If Wynn owned the old Penn station, and it stood on property he thought he could exploit, hed tear it down or blow it up in a second. Thats what has happened to other ancient landmarks (40 is geriatric in Vegas). The town treats its older hotels like a doddering uncle who needs to be put away. Or executed on Main Street. Other cities raze old buildings grudgingly, to the keening of preservationists; Vegas does it with pride and pizazz, as a media event and a warning that it will not tolerate the shabby status quo. In 1993, Wynn was pleased to blast the venerable Dunes to smithereens. On its gravesite Bellagio now stands. Last year Wynn demolished the Desert Inn, Las Vegas oldest major hotel-casino (it opened in 1950). In 2005 he will premiere Le Reve, his latest mirage, with even tonier suites at pricier prices.
Why would a visionary like Wynn want to build hotel rooms so attractive that visitors spend their time there, instead of their life savings at the $1,000 slots? For that matter, why would anyone want to stay in a hotel room, however suavely appointed, when theres a city out there that begs to be experienced with open eyes, mouth and pockets? One Vegas regular suggested that a lavish suite might be just the place to take an expensive call girl. We doubt that Wynn built Bellagio or Le Reve to make $500-a-night hookers feel more comfy. But the regular was on to something: the idea that, in Vegas, all contradictions can peacefully coexist. In this case, high art and high-priced sex.
Roller coasters, neon lights that flash and burn out, millions to be won or lost on a spin of the roulette wheel, billions spent on hotels destined for bankruptcy — these are no metaphors; these are monuments to manic-depression. And if gambling holds no thrill for you, if you dont care to pay for romance, you can still love Vegas. Love-hate it, that is. Sure, you can make a few dollars at the slots; at least, Mary can. But far more seductive is the chance to ride the new millennium as a minor character in the most thrilling novel never written. Thats Vegas, and you can bet on it.