(2 of 3)
The coaster ride, High Roller, is a mild high, a fifth of a mile high. The coaster circles the pod three times in just under a minute, reaching a granny-at-the-wheel top speed of 35 m.p.h. That's fast enough to italicize the giddiness and slow enough for you to dare to look out on the Vegas panorama. Toward the end the track climbs; your car takes a few nice, scary jolts--and you briefly join Stupak in his nightmare.
For the Big Shot, the Stratosphere's piece de resistance, you are harnessed into one of 16 seats facing in all four directions and mounted on the building's ultimate tower. Without warning you are shot up, as if sprung from a killer rubber band, 160 ft. into the sky at 45 m.p.h. and four Gs. And then, dear Lord!, you slam back down at negative gravity, your body pleading to soar through the restraints. Up and down you go a few more times in decreasing extremes. The whole thing, which lasts 31 sec., is a great, bearable kick. It's like experiencing, at warp speed, a manic-depressive attack. It is, one imagines, a lot like being inside Bob Stupak's head.
That must be a tense, excit-place. Stupak, a high school dropout, landed in Las Vegas in 1972. He cruised along in the town's minor leagues with Vegas World until 1989, when the Sahara, just a block away, quadrupled the size of its sign and moved it closer to Stupak's casino, tempting his customers away. Stupak wanted the one-upman's revenge. The Eiffel Tower, Seattle's Space Needle, the towers in Tokyo and Sydney, Australia, were all profitmaking monuments, he noted. A similar structure--but bigger, of course--would be his answer to modern Vegas' edifice complex and its Hey-Why-Not School of Architecture, with pyramids, guitars and the New York City skyline inspiring the look of new hotels. Stupak set about turning Vegas World into the Stratosphere Tower.
That was five years ago. There were flaws in the geometry; a wooden scaffolding caught fire; confidence in a money-raising public offering collapsed. Stupak had to sell all but 17% of his ownership, and the project was taken over by the Minnesota-based Grand Casinos firm. Locals dubbed the enterprise the Stupak Stump and the Tower of Bobel. But say this about the Stratosphere: the man did it. In time it may fly or fall; today it is the instant dominant Vegas symbol. The Stratosphere could be Stupak's Tinker Toy gift to the gaming industry, or it could be the ultimate sardonic gesture--a giant metallic finger to those who have doubted him.
At week's end the Stratosphere staff--some of them designated in corporate lingo as redog ("Roving Entertainers Delighting Our Guests")--was negotiating the cable-strewn floors. In Roxy's Diner, a '50s-style eatery, punk and geek waiters were studiously spinning yo-yos and polishing their patois ("neat," "ugly stick," "chick" and the immortal "your mother"). Says the Stratosphere's president David Wirshing: "No one's ever built a tower in conjunction with a facility like this before. There'll be all sorts of unknowns, and a few inevitable hitches." He might take heart from the notoriously ragged 1993 opening weekend for the Luxor down the street and the early glitches at the MGM Grand that Barbra Streisand enumerated onstage when she headlined there.