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The weirdest part of Vegas, with all its clean bawdiness, is that for a tourist town, it looks as if it might be developing a real urban center, where people not only party but meet, live and perhaps form the kind of community Vegas has never had--one in which people no longer change their cell-phone numbers every six months to escape from attachments, debts and exes. Real estate companies are racing to put up 20-story condo towers near the Strip. "People want to own a piece of Vegas," says Jeff Soffer, 36, principal owner of Miami-based Turnberry Associates, which is building condominium towers at the MGM Grand. The company had estimated it would take two years to sell the apartments in the first MGM tower. It took three months.
Retirees and people with a second home like the condos because they are easy to maintain, but a surprising number of locals buy apartments so they can be close to what Mayor Goodman calls, without irony, the intellectual center of Vegas. That center is being defined, in true American fashion, not by an ocean or an island but by a stretch of highway. "That's the view," says Lorenzo Fertitta from the presidential suite at the Green Valley Ranch. "The Strip is the beach and the water."
"We're going through the reverse of what so many cities have suffered through, this flight out of the city," says Jim Murren, the president and CFO of MGM Mirage and a longtime Vegas resident. The city last week unveiled its own public transportation system, a $650 million, privately funded monorail that, for $3 a ride, runs the 4-mile stretch from the convention center up the Strip to the MGM Grand, and someday is supposed to connect all the way from the airport to downtown. Turnberry and CENTRA Properties plan to build a 1.2 million-sq.-ft. outdoor mall near the Mandalay Bay, which will further the invasion of stores such as Saks, Macy's, Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom, now housed at the Fashion Show mall, which is close to finishing a $1 billion renovation. And downtown is building a giant furniture showroom that hopes to steal business from San Francisco and maybe even North Carolina. Mayor Goodman hopes that in the future people will think of Vegas for gambling, sex and furniture.
It's conceivable that in a few decades, Vegas will have completely shed its shame and its kitsch, that it will be a multidimensional one-industry town like Los Angeles, only more urban and with better food. Already the young and old come to Vegas without irony, and its widely copied faux architecture and grand showmanship are thought of around the globe as simply American. If New Vegas foretells something about America's future,then the culture wars are all but over, and culture lost. The only thing I miss about it is that culture went to bed at a decent hour. --With reporting by Laura A. Locke/Las Vegas