Living Las Vegas

Sunset, Feb, 1998 by Matthew Jaffe

We are driving among the new subdivisions in Green Valley, southeast of Las Vegas, where the red tile roofs spread like tamarisk to the desert's edge. Out in the distance, the Strip flickers to life in the late-afternoon light. In the American imagination, Las Vegas has always been just the Strip - Sin City, Bedford Falls without George Bailey, Mardi Gras without Lent. Now Hal Rothman, professor of history at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, is showing me a different city - what some people might say is the real Las Vegas, the modern American boomtown.

Rothman has lived in Las Vegas for six years. He has a new house going up in Green Valley Ranch, and we maneuver around an array of earth-moving equipment to go see it. His street is noisy and dusty, filled with construction workers, cement mixers, and lots and lots of brand-new houses. He points out a couple of lawns that have just gone in, a sign of imminent occupancy.

"When you move in," he says, "at first everything feels so new that it's uncomfortable. Then you just reinvent the space. You end up doing for yourself what the city is doing on a bigger scale. Las Vegas is what it is. It's constantly being reshaped."

The city being created here in the Nevada desert isn't just another Sun Belt metropolis, where the crabgrass meets the creosote bushes. Today's Las Vegas is remarkable in that it is both an international city - loud, glittering, and over-the-top - and the West's new suburban frontier. In the process, Las Vegas manages to be like everywhere. and nowhere else at the same time.

Rothman and I both grew up in older neighborhoods in the Midwest. We went to the same university, and we share an interest in historic preservation. I have a hard time imagining living in a neighborhood that sprang from the scrub only months before. He's moving into such a neighborhood in a month.

As we drive away from the subdivision and onto wide commercial streets lined with strip shopping centers, Rothman sums up a feeling that both addresses my doubts and is common in this emerging city.

"When I moved here, people used to apologize about living in Las Vegas," he says. "They don't do that now."

In 1990 the population of Clark County was 770,280. Last year it reached 1,192,200. In the first half of 1997, nearly 15,000 new residences were built in the county, and it received some 6,000 newcomers a month. Suburban Henderson is currently the fastest-growing city in the nation.

Given those statistics, I had come to Las Vegas fully prepared to accept its transformation into the new all-American city. As it turns out, I wasn't even off the plane before Vegas began to assert its very Vegasness. Chuck Berry was on my flight, and later that night, who should I see among the rock and roll artifacts of the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino? None other than this living artifact playing the $1 slots.

Then there was the full-size version of Homer and Marge Simpson's cartoon house being given away as a promotion by home builder Kaufman & Broad in a subdivision dubbed Springfield. There were showgirls filling up at gas stations, and a slot machine sound track - clanka, clanka, bing, bing, bing, bing - playing everywhere from the big casinos to strip-mall supermarkets.

Like Los Angeles, its bigger and older sister, Las Vegas is for many a hard city to love. It's about as quaint as spandex. Say postwar here and you're probably referring to the Persian Gulf.

In a city growing so fast, it's easy to build subdivisions. But how do you build a community? Residents new and old worry about the problems that come with growth: traffic, crime, double-session schools, and sprawl.

Yet many newcomers are surprised at just how much they enjoy living in the city. Alan Lipsky, director of development for the Lied Discovery Children's Museum, moved out from New York a few years back. He says there's something exciting about watching such a wide-open story play out.

"History is being reinvented here constantly," Lipsky says. "But I had a professor in college who told me that the great thing about New York in its heyday was that it didn't have time to look back either."

The new Las Vegas appeals to both high and low rollers. Rothman, who is writing a book about the city, says, "Las Vegas is the last Detroit." He explains that it's a blue-collar service economy where - like Detroit in the boom years of the auto industry - the good life is available to worker and boss alike.

The average dealer in a good Strip hotel, Rothman says, can make $35,000 to $40,000 per year. That's a reasonable salary in a city where $140,000 can buy a 2,000-square-foot house and the overall cost of living is 15 percent less than in Los Angeles (which may explain why a third of Vegas newcomers have arrived from Southern California).

At the same time, Las Vegas has a tradition of thinking very big. From the building of Hoover Dam to the construction of 9 of the 10 biggest hotels in the world, things tend to happen here on a colossal scale.

Out on the fringes of Henderson, Lake Las Vegas, a $4-billion residential and resort development, continues that tradition. This project centers on a 2-mile-long, 145-foot-deep manmade lake. Brochures promise the resort will include Venetian-style gondolas and a hotel designed to resemble the Ponte Vecchio in Florence. The average custom home price is $1.5 million, with waterfront lots going for as much as $1.75 million. Custom mailboxes run $2,000.