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Last year 8 million of the city's 22 million visitors were under 40, and nearly half of those were under 30. When Soul Asylum, as part of the MTV- sponsored 1993 Alternative Nation tour, landed at its last U.S. stop in Las Vegas, the band deviated from its song list to belt out Vegasy tunes like Mandy and Rhinestone Cowboy. Luke Perry and Jason Priestley of Beverly Hills, 90210, huge Tom Jones fans, recently flew to Vegas to see their hero sing, and members of the Red Hot Chili Peppers went to Las Vegas to see and meet Julio Iglesias. "Suddenly the same things I was doing five years ago that were considered pure corn are now perceived to be in," says Wayne Newton. "It's a wonderful satisfaction to finally be hip."
Long before this generation of young hipsters started reveling in the Vegas gestalt, certain intellectuals were taking seriously the city's no-holds- barred urban style. It was 25 years ago that a little-known architect and professor, Robert Venturi, returned to Yale with his two dozen student acolytes after a remarkable 10-day expedition to Las Vegas, where they stayed at the Stardust. His influential 1972 book, Learning from Las Vegas, immediately made Venturi famous as a heretical high-culture proponent for the ad hoc, populist design of the Strip -- the giant neon signs, the kitschy architectural allusions to ancient Rome and the Old West, any zany kind of skin-deep picturesqueness. And a decade later, the fringe tendency became a full-fledged movement: Post-Modernism.
Today almost every big-city downtown has new skyscrapers that endeavor to look like old skyscrapers. Almost every suburb has a shopping center decorated with phony arches, phony pediments, phony columns. Two decades after Venturi proposed, with the intellectual's standard perverse quasi-affection, that Vegas could be a beacon for the nation's architecture, his manifesto had transformed America. Forget the Bauhaus and your house -- it is the Vegas aesthetic, architecture as grandiose cartoon, that has become the American Establishment style. And so the splendidly pyramidal new Luxor and cubist new MGM Grand (both the work of local architect Veldon Simpson) do not seem so weird, since equally odd buildings now exist all over the place.
As it was being created in the '50s, Vegas' Strip was a mutant kind of American main drag, an absurdly overscaled Main Street for cars instead of people. Everywhere else in the country the shopping mall was replacing the traditional downtown. But now the Strip in Las Vegas has come full circle, its vacant stretches filling in with so many new hotels and casinos that what had been the ultimate expression of car culture has masses of tourists walking from Bally's to Caesars to Treasure Island, and from the Luxor to the Excalibur to the MGM Grand. The Strip is virtually an old-fashioned Main Street.