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Meanwhile malls, the fin-de-siecle scourge of genuine Main Streets, have become preposterous Vegasy extravaganzas themselves -- themed, entertainment driven, all-inclusive, overwhelming. The West Edmonton Mall in Alberta, with its 119 acres of stores and restaurants and the world's largest indoor amusement park, pulled in 22 million people in 1992, as many as visited Las Vegas; and the 16-month-old Mall of America outside Minneapolis, with only 96 acres of money-spending opportunity and America's largest indoor amusement park, claimed 40 million visitors in its first year.
Yet even as the rest of America has become more and more like Las Vegas, life for Vegas residents as well as visitors is more thoroughly sugar-frosted with fantasy than anywhere else. "Our customers want a passive experience," says Wynn, "but romantic." Such as his ersatz South Seas restaurant, Kokomos ("Kokomos -- this is better than Hawaii. There's no place in the South Pacific where the light is so perfect, so beautiful"). At the Mediterranean- themed resort Wynn envisions for the new Dunes site down the Strip, he has talked of creating a kind of raffish virtual Nazism: at a casino-restaurant modeled on Rick's casino-restaurant in Casablanca, scenes from the movie would seamlessly blend with live actors playing Bogart and the movie's other characters among the paying customers.
The new Las Vegas has even fabricated a bit of ersatz old Las Vegas: along with its Oriental- and Bahamian-themed suites, the MGM offers rooms themed according to a decorator's Vegas ideal. The Sands, one of the last intact artifacts of the Rat Pack golden era, is being remodeled to within an inch of its life. "We're going to theme, definitely," the hotel's p.r. spokeswoman said as work was beginning late last year. "But we don't know what the themes are yet."
Even civilians must theme. At the Lakes, an upscale housing complex, the developer has built a whole tract of Gothic minicastles, one next to the other. Mountain Spa, a high-end resort and corporate retreat now being plotted on 640 acres in the city's northwest, will have a "Mediterranean feel -- more of a St. Tropez feel than a Mexican-American feel," says developer Jack Sommer. "I have no trouble deviating from the established regional architecture. This is Las Vegas."
The standard Las Vegas development is, like so many others throughout the country, fenced and gated -- and each free-standing middle-class house is in most cases walled off from its neighbors. Such fortress domesticity, says University of Nevada at Las Vegas political scientist Bill Thompson, "makes it hard to see your neighbors. You don't even see your neighbors to say hi. A lot of people came here to start over, to change, and they don't want people attachments. Or rather they want to make their own people attachments, not to be thrown in with people just because their house is next door."