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Copyright Las Vegas Review-Journal
VARIETY OF INFLUENCES: What Makes Las Vegas Las Vegas
City shaped by desert heat and dreams of getting a fresh start
By JOHN PRZYBYS
REVIEW-JOURNAL
Illustration by David Stroud.
We Las Vegans have a confusing attitude about sex. We're offended by Strip porn pamplets but love uncovered Strip shows.
File photo
The Whiskerino contest, a staple of the city's Helldorado celebration during the 1950s, is one example of how we reveled then -- and still revel now -- in cowboy culture.
File photo
What is Las Vegas?
A place. An idea. A stereotype. And, for those of us who happen to live here, a city that defines us in ways we probably don't even realize.
Las Vegas is a place steeped in contradiction and shaped, either subtly or overtly, by both natural and man-made forces that, in turn, shape us.
That's why we batted around this question: What are the basic forces -- things, ideas, conditions -- that define Las Vegas and make it different from any other place in the world?
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RESTAURANT REPORT
Here are our conclusions. We don't pretend that our conclusions are the final word. Feel free to do some batting around of your own.
THE DESERT
Las Vegas is shaped in large part by the desert. The heat, dryness and wind have challenged everyone from the earliest American Indian inhabitants to the Mormons who settled here to everybody who has since passed through, visited or come to stay.
"We've perfected the art of going from air-conditioned room to air-conditioned room," jokes Michael Green, a history professor at the College of Southern Nevada.
For many Southern Nevadans, summer here is akin to winter in the country's colder climes: Dig in and wait for it to end. But that attitude, notes David G. Schwartz, director of the Center for Gaming Research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, "leads to a culture that's less communal, because people spend less time outdoors, and I think people kind of turn inward."
The harsh summer climate also creates a "privatization of public spaces," Schwartz adds. "You're not going to stroll around the park. You're going to be inside of a mall."
Living in the desert "requires that we adapt to it," Green says. "That has its good side -- solar energy is becoming more important -- and it has its bad side. Look at the water we've wasted trying to create the front lawns that we had in the communities we moved here from."
SEX-SATURATED CULTURE
It's difficult to think of another American city that has such a confusing, ambivalent attitude about sex.
We hate porn pamphleteers on the Strip and proudly tell visitors that prostitution is illegal in Clark County. At the same time, we consider performing uncovered -- not "topless," thank you -- in a show on the Strip as valid a career path for young women as any other, and barely notice casino cocktail waitress outfits are more risque than an entire Frederick's of Hollywood catalog.
Our attitude toward sex, Green says, "makes us more enlightened in certain ways and less enlightened in others, less enlightened in the sense that we put that premium on attractiveness of humans, and especially females, and the human body."
At the same time, Green continues, our attitude toward sex does offer women the opportunity to "make a living in something that other communities might not consider proper. And while there is obvious exploitation, there is also a degree of opportunity, as I was reminded by a student who pointed out she makes three times what I did."
Yet, Green adds, "I'm also reminded of a former student of mine who was a nude dancer who told me once that she enjoyed the work and made a lot of money at it, but she was in school because she knew that, unlike me, she had a shelf life."
TRANSIENCE
Native Las Vegans remain rarer than a winning draw on an inside straight. But even transplants who have lived here for years may never stop thinking of themselves as expatriate-whatevers, rather than as Las Vegans.
Some newcomers, Schwartz says, have a "boomtown mentality." They want to get everything they can out of Las Vegas and move on. "We're like a modern-day Virginia City or Goldfield or Searchlight with nicer buildings.
"People move here and think, 'I'm going to get a great job and make $50,000 parking cars, and I'll do that a couple years, save up, buy a house, get a lot of equity, trade out and move back home.' And it doesn't always work."
In the meantime, that presumably temporary Las Vegan may be less concerned about the here than the where-next. Why make friends if you're just going to leave? Why support schools and libraries if your kids won't be here to use them? Why care about your neighborhood if it's only going to be "your" neighborhood temporarily. Getting involved in facing the community's problems has little relevance to people constantly looking ahead.
LAND OF REINVENTION
Of course, a forward-looking mind-set isn't necessarily a bad thing. If there is an upside to the transience that is a hallmark of this city, it's the notion that Las Vegas also is a place where you can reinvent yourself, throwing off your former life like a neon-bedecked butterfly emerging from a Rust-Belted chrysalis.
Newcomers, Schwartz says, can arrive in Las Vegas "free of family history, free of their own history and can really start from scratch."
It's a common story even among some of our founding fathers, who arrived in Las Vegas trailing pasts that were borderline unsavory (Benny Binion) or downright criminal (pick a Mafioso, any Mafioso) and transformed themselves into upstanding citizens.
This notion of reinvention even applies to the city itself. Here, Schwartz says, there exists "I don't want to say a hatred of the past, but definitely a disdain of the past."
CASINO CULTURE
Outsiders think it odd that casinos are so much more to Las Vegans than just places to gamble. They're also community centers, movie and show venues, banks where we cash our paychecks and places where we enjoy some of the best meals in town.
Here's another, more subtle, way in which casinos affect our lives: Because they operate 24 hours a day, "it means we lead our lives on a 24/7 schedule in ways other places don't," Green says.
"My dad was a dealer for 30 years, and my aunt in Phoenix used to say, 'Why don't you come down for the weekend?" My mother would say, 'Your weekend or our weekend?' My dad was off Wednesday and Thursday."
That, Green says, "can affect the development of community, the development of tradition, in ways that we don't really think about."
OLD WEST STATE OF MIND
The Wild West long has been tamed, but that doesn't mean Las Vegans still aren't enamored of what we imagine it to have been and are eager to adopt its virtues as our own.
Go back to the 1930s, when wide-open gaming became legal, Green says, "and you have a lot of people walking around (wearing) cowboy outfits, and not just to Helldorado Days.
"It was kind of part of building the image of this Western town. The first two hotels were the Last Frontier and El Rancho Vegas, with all the Western layouts. The slogan at the time was, 'Still a frontier town.' "
Las Vegans still revel in that cowboy state of mind. Our (lower-case-L) libertarian leanings make us live-and-let-live types. We wear cowboy boots and 10-gallon hats even if we've never been closer to a ranch than Helldorado, and we still have a grudging, almost childlike admiration of the Western-hero rugged individualist.
"There's always been a love for the character who stands up to authority or stands up for himself," Green says. Whether it's John Wayne, Benny Binion or Bugs Bunny, "there's this admiration for people who say or do things we don't have the guts to do."
SOMETHING FOR NOTHING
Las Vegas is a city built on the perception that anybody can be a winner, that actions have no consequences and that we're entitled to pretty much anything we want, darn it.
Drop a few bucks into a slot machine and walk out a millionaire. Do anything you want to because, as the commercials tell us, what happens here stays here. And enjoy that comped meal, because no steakhouse in Omaha, Neb., would buy the argument that you've already purchased three meals so why shouldn't they give you one for free.
We have, in part, the mob and those individualistic resort proprietors of years past to thank for this collective entitlement complex. Back in the "pre-corporate" days of Las Vegas, casino bosses "understood the house was going to come out ahead in the end," Green says.
"If somebody came in and blew some money, comping that person to a $2.99 dinner was not a big deal," he says.
Today, the expectation for the freebie remains in the form of everything from slot club cards to a free drink when we cash our checks at the casino cage.
Getting something for nothing has a "basic human appeal," notes H. Lee Barnes, a novelist who teaches English and creative writing at the College of Southern Nevada. "It's just that, here, it's wide-open. It's in-your-face."
NEON
A city is defined not only by ideas but by things. And out of all of the things that define Las Vegas, neon is perfect.
It's bright and colorful, and its glow is reassuring. It's a perfect combination of the hard (glass tubes) and the soft (the gases inside the tube). Neon is garish and classy, scientific and artistic, practical and ethereal.
Sure, the popularity of neon signs is declining in Las Vegas. But, even today, if you were on "Password" and the clue was "neon," wouldn't you answer "Las Vegas"? And would the opening credits to "Viva Las Vegas" be quite as kinetic without that montage of neon signs?
"Neon was not invented for Las Vegas, but it certainly looks like it was a marriage made in heaven," Green says.
FAUX VEGAS AND THE VIRTUES OF FAKERY
We mean this in the best sense, but does anybody do fakery better than Las Vegas?
Want to visit a faux Eiffel Tower or a fake Lake Como? Want to see otherwise average-looking people burnished to supernova hotness? Want to indulge in the almost-always notion that one spin will change your life?
Welcome to Las Vegas.
Once, people went west to search for gold. And, Barnes says, "they dug their gold mines, and when the mines petered out, they built their cities."
Here, Barnes says, they created "an illusory place where you could mine money without having to dig for it. So marketing took the place of the shovel and the pick."
Of course, "how disappointing it is when visitors arrive in Las Vegas and discover that we don't all look like the people in the commercials?" Green adds.
"I mean, there is a degree of illusion -- call it illusion, call it fakery -- that you are going to win, and the chances are you aren't, the illusion that you're going to meet a goddess or an Adonis when your chances aren't that good."
The trick is to enjoy the illusion without taking it too seriously.
EPICENTER OF WEIRD
Pick a famous crazy person, any one. Odds are that, whoever you pick, he or she will have some connection, however tenuous, to Las Vegas.
Charles Manson. John Wayne Gacy. The 9/11 hijackers. Their paths all intersected with Las Vegas'.
It could be nothing more than coincidence. Or, maybe, simple probability: Everybody visits Las Vegas eventually, so why wouldn't the infamous drop by, too?
"We have so many different people visiting here," Green notes. "If you show up and you're a little weird, or a lot weird, who notices? And, you can blend in."
Las Vegas is the real-life urban equivalent of the Mos Eisley Cantina in "Star Wars" or "Rick's Cafe Americain" in "Casablanca": A place that attracts everybody, regardless of social standing, origin or morality. Here, in this crossroad city, "you're going to encounter all manner of people," Green says.
That's not necessarily bad. A crossroads is "where people with absolutely nothing in common can meet and interact and even have a meaningful conversation ... simply because you're at a crossroads," Green says. "I think that defines us in ways we don't realize."
And, if you're so inclined, a crossroads also is, Green adds, "a place where you can disappear into the woodwork."
Contact reporter John Przybys at jprzybys@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0280.
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