In recent years, however, something wholly unexpected has happened on the Strip. Like those islands where an introduced species reproduces so successfully that its teeming hordes devastate their surroundings and starve en masse, the Strip has attracted so many cars that its eight lanes of traffic are in continual gridlock. Its fabulous neon signs were made to be seen while driving past at a good clip, as are big signs fronting mediocre buildings on every commercial strip, but this Strip of Strips has instead in the last several years become a brand-new outpost of pedestrian life. The once-scattered casinos on the Strip have grown together into a boulevard of fantasies and lures, and tourists can now stow their car in one casino’s behemoth parking lot and wander the Strip on foot for days, and they do, by the millions—more than 30 million a year, upward of 200,000 at once on the busiest weekends. Even in August, when it was about 100 degrees Fahrenheit after dark, I have seen the throngs stream back and forth on the Strip, slowly—though not much more slowly than the cars. Casino architecture itself has undergone radical changes since the prescient 1966 Caesars Palace played up fantasy architecture over neon signage and the 1989 Mirage presented the first facade specifically designed as a pedestrian spectacle. It seemed to me that if walking could suddenly revive in this most inhospitable and unlikely place, it had some kind of a future, and that by walking the Strip myself I might find out what that future was.
Fremont Street’s old-fashioned glitter has suffered by comparison with the Strip’s new fantasy environments, so it has been redesigned as a sort of cyber-arcade. Its central blocks have been closed to cars so that pedestrians can mill around freely, and up above the resurfaced street is set a high, arched roof on which laser shows are beamed by night, so that what was once sky is now a kind of giant television screen. It’s still a sad half-abandoned place in daylight, and it didn’t take me long to tour it and wander south on Las Vegas Boulevard, which would eventually become the Strip. Before it becomes the Strip, the boulevard is a skid row of motels, shabby apartments, and sad souvenir, pornography, and pawn shops, the ugly backside of the gambling, tourism, and entertainment industries. A homeless black man huddled in a brown blanket at a bus stop looked at me walking by, and I looked at an Asian couple across the street coming out of one of the tiny wedding chapels, him in a dark suit, her in a chalk-white dress, so impersonally perfect they could have fallen off a colossal wedding cake. Here each enterprise seemed to stand on its own; the wedding chapel unintimidated by the sex shops, the fanciest casinos by the ruins and vacant lots around them. There weren’t many people on the sidewalk with me in this sagging section between the two official versions of Vegas.
Farther on I came to the old El Rancho hotel, burned out and boarded up. The desert and the West had been romanticized by many of the earlier casinos: the Dunes, the Sands, the Sahara, and the Desert Inn on the Strip and the Pioneer Club, the Golden Nugget, the Frontier Club, and the Hotel Apache on Fremont Street, but more recent casinos have thrown regional pride to the winds and summoned up anyplace else, the less like the Mojave the better. The Sands is being replaced by the Venetian, complete with canals. I realized later that my walk was an attempt to find a continuity of experience here, the spatial continuity walking usually provides, but the place would defeat me with its discontinuities of light and fantasy. It defeated me another way too. Las Vegas, which had a population of 5 at the beginning of the twentieth century, 8,500 in 1940, and about half a million in the 1980s, when the casinos seemed to stand alone in the sweep of creosote bushes and yuccas, now has about 1.25 million residents and is the fastest growing city in the country. The glamorous Strip is surrounded by a colossal sprawl of trailer parks, golf courses, gated communities, and generic subdivisions—one of Vegas’s abundant ironies is that it has a pedestrian oasis in the heart of the ultimate car suburb. I had wanted to walk from the Strip to the desert to connect the two, and I called the local cartographic company for recommendations about routes, since all my maps were long out of date. They told me that the city was growing so fast they put out a new map every month and recommended some of the shortest routes between the southern Strip and the city edge, but Pat and I drove along them and saw they were alarming places for a solitary walker—a mix of warehouses, light industrial sites, dusty lots, and walled homes from which an aura of abandonment emanated, only occasionally interrupted by a car or grimy hobo. So I stuck to the pedestrian oasis and found that I could mentally move the great casinos like chess pieces from the flat board of the desert: ten years back the fantasy casinos were gone; twenty years back the casinos were scattered and there were almost no pedestrians; fifty years back there were only a few isolated outposts; and a century ago only a tiny whiskey-saloon hamlet disturbed the pale earth spreading in every direction.
Under the tired pavilion in front of the Stardust, an old French couple asked me for directions to the Mirage. I watched them walk slowly away from the old vehicular American fantasyland of glittering futures and toward the new nostalgic fantasyland at the Strip’s heart and followed them south myself. The scattered walkers began to become crowds as I traveled south. The bride and groom I had seen come out of the wedding chapel showed up again walking down the boulevard near me, she with a delicate quilted jacket over her wedding dress and spike heels. Tourists come here from around the affluent world (and employees from some of the less affluent ones, notably Central America). Another of Vegas’s ironies is that it is one of the world’s most visited cities, but few will notice the actual city. In, for example, Barcelona or Katmandu, tourists come to see the locals in their natural habitat, but in Vegas the locals appear largely as employees and entertainers in the anywhere-but-here habitat built for tourists. Tourism itself is one of the last major outposts of walking. It has always been an amateur activity, one not requiring special skills or equipment, one eating up free time and feeding visual curiosity. To satisfy curiosity you must be willing to seem naive, to engage, to explore, to stare and be stared at, and people nowadays seem more willing or able to enter that state elsewhere than at home. What is often taken as the pleasure of another place may be simply that of the different sense of time, space, and sensory stimulation available anywhere one goes slowly.
The Frontier was the first casino I went inside. For six and a half years visitors could watch an outdoor floor show there, a round-the-clock picket of workers—maids, cocktail waitresses, busboys—fighting the union-busting new owners, testifying with their feet and their signs day and night, in summer’s withering heat and winter’s storms. During those years 101 babies were born and 17 people died among the Frontier strikers, and none of them crossed the picket line. It became the great union battle of the decade, a national inspiration to labor activists. In 1992 the AFL-CIO organized a related event, the Desert Solidarity March. Union activists and strikers walked three hundred miles from the Frontier across the desert to the courthouse in Los Angeles in a show of their willingness to suffer and prove their commitment. Vegas filmmaker Amie Williams commented, while showing me rushes from her documentary on the Frontier strike, that the union is like an American religion of family and solidarity: it has a credo, “An injury to one is an injury to all”—and in the Desert Solidarity March it got its pilgrimage. In Amie’s footage, people who looked like they didn’t walk much at all straggled in a line alongside old Route 66, bared their feet for bandaging in the evenings, and got up and did it again the next day. A carpenter and union representative named Homer, a bearded man who looked like a biker, testified to the pilgrimage’s miracle: in the middle of a rainstorm, a sunspot followed them, and they stayed dry, and he sounded as enthused as one of the children of Israel for whom the Red Sea parted. Finally the union-busting family that had bought the Frontier was forced to sell, and on January 31, 1997, the new owners invited the union back in. Those who had spent six exhilarating years walking the line went back to mixing drinks and making beds. There was nothing of that struggle to see inside the Frontier, just the usual supernova of dizzily pat
terned carpet, jingling slots, flashing lights, mirrors, staff moving briskly and visitors milling slowly in the twilight that suffuses every casino. They are modern mazes, made to get lost in, with their windowless expanses full of odd angles, view-obscuring banks of slot machines, and other distractions designed, like those in malls and department stores, to prolong visitors’ encounters with the temptations that might make them open their wallets before they find the well-concealed exits. Many casinos have “people movers”—moving ramps like those in airports—but here they are all inward-bound. Finding the way out is up to you.
Wandering and gambling have some things in common; they are both activities in which anticipation can be more delicious than arrival, desire more reliable than satisfaction. To put one foot in front of one another or one’s cards on the table is to entertain chance, but gambling has become a highly predictable science for the casinos, and they and the law enforcement of Las Vegas are trying to control the odds on walking down the Strip too. The Strip is a true boulevard. It is exposed to the weather, open to its surroundings, a public space in which those glorious freedoms granted by the First Amendment can be exercised, but a mighty effort is being made to take them away, so that the Strip will instead be a sort of amusement park or mall, a space in which we can be consumers but not citizens. Next to the Frontier is the Fashion Show Shopping Center, where leafletters hang out together, forming one of the Strip’s many subcultures. Many are undocumented Central Americans, Amie Williams said, and the leaflets most often pertain to sex (though Vegas has a huge sex industry, customers are sought largely by advertisements, not by street hustling; the dozens of clusters of newsstands along the Strip contain very few newspapers and a veritable library of brochures, cards, and leaflets with color photographs advertising an army of “private dancers” and “escort services”). Since the women themselves are largely invisible, the visibility of the ads has come under assault. The county passed an ordinance making “off-premises canvassing” in the “resort district” a misdemeanor. The director of the Nevada outpost of the American Civil Liberties Union, Gary Peck, spoke to me of “the almost transparent paradox that Vegas markets itself as anything goes—sex, alcohol, gambling—and on the other hand has this almost obsessive attempt at thorough control of public space, advertising on billboards, in the airport, panhandling, free speech.” The ACLU’s fight over the handbill ordinance had reached the Federal Court of Appeals, and other issues kept cropping up. Earlier that year, petition-gathers were harassed and a pastor and four companions were arrested for proselytizing in the Fremont Street Experience on charges of “blocking a sidewalk,” though the now-pedestrian arcade is one vast sidewalk it would take dozens to obstruct.
The casinos and the county, Peck told me, are trying to privatize the very sidewalks, to give themselves more muscle for prosecuting or removing anyone engaging in First Amendment activities—speaking about religion, sex, politics, economics—or otherwise ruffling the smooth experience visitors are supposed to have (similarly, Tucson has recently looked into privatizing sidewalks by leasing them for one dollar to businesses, to allow them to drive out the homeless). Peck worries that if they succeed in taking away the ancient “freedom of the city” at the sidewalk level, it will set a precedent for the rest of the country, malling what were once genuine public spaces, making cities into theme parks. “The theme park,” writes Michael Sorkin, “presents its happy regulated version of pleasure—all those artfully hoodwinking forms—as a substitute for the democratic urban realm, and it does so appealingly by stripping troubled urbanity of its sting, of the presence of the poor, of crime, of dirt, of work.” The Mirage has already posted a little sign on one of its lawns: “This sidewalk is the private property of the Mirage Casino Hotel upon which an easement has been granted to facilitate pedestrian movement. Anyone found loitering or otherwise impeding pedestrian movement is subject to arrest for trespass,” and signs up and down the strip say, “Resort District: No Obstructive Uses Permitted on Public Sidewalks.” The signs are there not to protect the freedom of movement of pedestrians, but to restrict what those pedestrians can do or see.
I was hot and weary from the four miles or so I’d gone from Fremont Street, for it was a warm day and the air was stale with exhaust. Distance is deceptive on the Strip: the major intersections are about a mile apart, but the new casinos with their twenty-or-thirty-story hotel towers tend to look closer because their scale doesn’t register. Treasure Island is the first of the new theme-park casinos one reaches from the north, and one of the most fantastic—named not after a place or period like the rest, but after a boys’ book about pirate life in the South Seas. With a facade of fake rock and picturesque building fronts behind its lagoon of palm trees and pirate ships, it resembles a hotel-resort version of Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean ride. But it was the adjoining Mirage that invented the pedestrian spectacle in 1989, with its volcano that erupts every fifteen minutes after dark, to the delight of gathered crowds. When Treasure Island opened in 1993, it upstaged the volcano with a full-fledged pirate battle climaxing with the sinking of a ship—but the battle only takes place a few times a day.
The authors of Learning from Las Vegas long ago groused that “the Beautification Committee would continue to recommend turning the Strip into a western Champs-Elysées, obscuring the signs with trees and raising the humidity with giant fountains.” The fountains have arrived, and the vast sheets of water fronting the Mirage and Treasure Island are dwarfed by the eight-acre lake at Bellagio, down where the Dunes used to be, across Flamingo Road from Caesars Palace. Together these four casinos make something altogether new and surprisingly old-fashioned, a wild hybrid of the formal garden and the pleasure garden spread out along a public thoroughfare. The Mirage’s volcano buried the old Vegas as decisively as Vesuvius did Pompeii, changing architecture and audiences together. The fountains are everywhere, and it is a kind of western Champs-Élysées, in that walking to look at the architecture and the other walkers has become a pastime. The Strip is replacing its neon-go-go Americana futurama vision with Europe, a fun pop-culture version of Europe, a Europe of architectural greatest hits and boulevardiers in shorts and T-shirts. Is there anything less peculiar about setting miniature Italian and Roman temples and bridges in English gardens than in putting up gargantuan ones in the desert, in building volcanoes in eighteenth-century gardens such as Wörlitz in Germany than on boulevards in Nevada? Caesars Palace, with its dark green cypresses, fountains, and classical statuary out front, calls up many of the elements of the formal garden, which was itself an Italian extension of Roman practices adapted by the French, Dutch, and English. Bellagio, with its frontage of fountains, recalls Versailles, whose scale was a demonstration of wealth, power, and triumph over nature. These places are mutant reprises of the landscapes in which walking as scenic pleasure was developed. Vegas has become the successor to Vauxhall, Ranelagh, Tivoli, and all the other pleasure gardens of the past, a place where the unstructured pleasures of walking and looking mingle with highly organized shows (stages for music, theater, and pantomimes were an important part of pleasure gardens, as were areas to dance, eat, drink, and sit). As a Vegas promoter might say, the garden is making a comeback, crossbred with the boulevard, and with them comes pedestrian life.
All the efforts to control who strolls and how suggest that walking may in some way still be subversive. At least it subverts the ideals of entirely privatized space and controlled crowds, and it provides entertainment in which nothing is spent or consumed. Though walking may be an inadvertent side effect of gambling—after all, the casino facades weren’t built out of public-spiritedness—the Strip is now a place to walk. And after all, Paris’s Champs-Élysées also belongs to tourists and foreigners nowadays, strolling, shopping, eating, drinking, and enjoying the sights. New pedestrian overpasses eliminate the intersection of people and cars where Flamingo Road crosses the Strip, and they are handsome bridges giving some of the best views around. But these bridges
are entered and exited from within the casinos, so there may come a time when only the well-dressed can cross the street safely here, and the rabble will have to take their chances with the cars or make a long detour. The Strip is not the Champs-Élysées reborn for other reasons too; it lacks the perfect straightness Le Nôtre gave the older road, the straightness that lets you see far into the distance. It bends and bulges, though there are always the cross-streets—and the bridge over Flamingo Road between Bellagio and Caesars provided the best view yet of the desert to the west and Red Rocks. From the other bridge, the one over the Strip from Bellagio to Bally’s, I could see—Paris! I had forgotten that a Paris casino was under construction, but there rising out of the dusty soil of the Mojave like an urban mirage, a flâneur’s apparition, was the Eiffel Tower, only half finished and half scale but already aggressively straddling what looked like a stumpy Louvre with the Arc de Triomphe jostling it in an antigeographic jumble of architectural greatest hits.
Of course Vegas is reinventing not only the garden, but the city: New York, New York is just down the road from Bellagio, the Tokyo-homage Imperial Palace is up the street, and a much older version of San Francisco—the Barbary Coast—faces Caesars. The 1996 New York, New York is, like the Paris casino, a cluster of famous features; inside is a funny little maze of streets made to look like various Manhattan neighborhoods, complete with street signs, shops (of which only the souvenir and food shops are real, as I found when I foolishly lunged for a bookstore), air conditioners jutting out third-floor windows, and even a graffiti corner—but, of course, without the variety, productive life, dangers, and possibilities of real urban life. Fronted by a Statue of Liberty welcoming gamblers rather than huddled masses yearning to be free, New York, New York is a walk-through souvenir of the city. No longer pocket-size and portable but a destination in itself, it performs a souvenir’s function: recalling a few pleasant and reassuringly familiar aspects of a complicated place. I ate a late lunch in New York, New York and drank three pints of water to replenish what had evaporated from me in the desert aridity of my all-day walk.
Wanderlust: A History of Walking Page 38
