The answer to the question "What is Las Vegas?" is quite simple and hasn't changed in a century. Las Vegas is a five mile strip of highway that runs through the desert that ends in "downtown" a.k.a. Fremont Street. Of course there is no downtown any more. The days when Fremont Street had a movie theater, furniture store, Woolworths, and Coronet, restaurants, a grocery store and more are long gone. Downtown itself is now nothing more than a handful of barely surviving casinos with kiosks down the middle of the street under what is advertised as the worlds largest neon sign. Until a year or so ago there were also a small collection of quaint little houses and two or three blocks of by the week motels that had been there forever.
Photo: The unfinished Fountainbleu
Around the time of the big Real Estate boom it was announced that Zappos was moving its headquarters to downtown. It was going to bring ten thousand new people downtown. It sounded great - even after the Real Estate bust. Tony Hseih of Zappos and another group decided to revitalize downtown. I am fond of revitalization of neighborhoods. I'm from Chicago. Some great old, declining neighborhoods are now the "in" spots to live. When I was a kid, my mother talked about how the neighborhood she lived in grew, declined and was reborn. BUT Las Vegas isn't Chicago . . . or New York, or even L.A. It is a five mile strip of highway through the middle of the desert. That's what it was, and that's what it will be forever . . . or until the powers that be realize it can no longer survive on gambling, tourism and minimum wage jobs, especially not since you can play the slots within driving distance of any place in the country whether it be bingo parlors or a full blown casino on an Indian reservation or a river boat on the Mississippi. Oscar Goodman, a self-admitted drinker's, dream for downtown while he was Mayor was a block of one bar after another. Little happened except a new neon sign heralding "Fremont Street East" while he was Mayor, but Tony Hseih has stepped in and in the last year all the old souvenir shops and vacant buildings are now bars. Viva Las Vegas!
The rest of Las Vegas - what most people think of as Las Vegas at least - is the Strip. I think there are twenty casinos now. Huge buildings that pay tribute to destinations around the world - rather than Las Vegas itself. Most of the Strip is torn up most of the time which means the Strip is actually about two and a half miles. Recently, in an attempt to get people to know where they lived and why they should get a business license specific to the business's location, a county official explained it by saying, "Elvis never played Las Vegas and the song should be called Viva Clark County." People who live here don't get it so why try to explain it to those who visit. It makes no difference. They are coming to see the five miles of road through the middle of the desert that ends at Fremont Street and the world's largest neon sign.
Truth is - there ain't much here. On the other hand, you don't have to shovel your car out from a mile high drift of sunshine either.
