Lovin' Las Vegas

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The owners of Palms Casino Resort, which opened at the end of 2001, decided to aim even younger. The Maloof brothers, who also own the Sacramento Kings basketball team, built the Palms off-Strip and gave it no theme, figuring Vegas visitors would find out which hotel fit their demographic. (Wynn will also be unthemed, as will the Palazzo.) "I wanted to make sure I cultivated young Hollywood," says George Maloof, 40, the brother who runs the hotel. "In the '70s, '80s and most of the '90s, Hollywood didn't really come to Las Vegas except for a big fight. Now it's every weekend."

Maloof made the Palms a hipster draw by housing the 2002 edition of MTV's Real World in the hotel, a move the rest of Vegas thought was suicide (having cameras inside a hotel was believed to be like asking the gaming commission to shut you down). But the Real World scheme worked. It made the hotel and its steak house, nightclubs and tattoo parlor the hottest spots for the barely legal. It is Britney Spears' home away from home whenever she's in town to get married. "I have friends of friends who are 17 years old, and they can't wait to go to Vegas," Maloof says. "The trust-fund babies will do anything they can do to go to our clubs."

The young people of New Vegas mostly come from L.A., and they spend most of their time at the clubs, which have sprung up like stripper poles. Every hotel has at least one disco and an ultralounge, the Vegas term for a Eurotrash bar with overpriced drinks. "The clubs are now carrying Vegas," says Cy Waits, vip manager at MGM's Tab bar. "Young people are more reckless with their money." The clubs are a big draw for women, who outnumber the men. "We give women some empowerment," says Jennifer Worthington, 32, who co-owns Coyote Ugly, BiKiNiS and Tangerine. "Let them dance on a table and feel like a star for a minute."

Along with clubs, music venues have sprouted up in the hotels, replacing the crooners with major pop and hip-hop acts. "For years people thought it was where acts go to retire," says Russell Jones, general manager of House of Blues Las Vegas, where Prince, Snoop Dogg and James Brown have played this year. "Now a lot of [current] acts come through three times a year."

The only part of the action that casinos don't control are the strip clubs, and they're trying to change that. Last year, a few hotel-casino owners quietly started a conversation about getting the gaming commission to allow them to put in strip joints. It didn't go well. So for now, they're compromising with burlesque, which is the kind of stripping Janet Jackson was supposed to do. Burlesque dancers do shows at Tangerine at TI, which opened in early July, and 40 Deuce, which opens at the Mandalay Bay in a few months.

But most of Vegas agrees that the casinos will eventually find a way to bring the strip clubs inside. "It's guaranteed. It's just a matter of when," says Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman, 64, a former defense attorney for alleged mobsters who officially oversees just a small part of town north of the Strip called Glitter Gulch, a technicality that does not stop him from representing everyone anywhere near Vegas. Goodman, a spokesman for Bombay Sapphire gin, sponsor of monthly "martinis with the mayor" events, is a proponent of allowing strippers in the casinos as well as expanding legalized prostitution, now allowed in some parts of Nevada. But in a struggle replicated in most families, Vegas is changing faster than the older, more conservative gaming-control board wants. The board yanked two billboards that the Hard Rock put up this year — one had a naked woman lying on a blackjack table with a card in her mouth above the line THERE'S ALWAYS A TEMPTATION TO CHEAT. The casino agreed to pay $300,000 to settle a claim that the ads hurt Nevada's image. This, remember, is a state where some cities have legal whorehouses.