The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories

by Edward Hollis

  IT IS TWELVE YEARS after the end of history. A Western merchant stands before an Eastern potentate in the Hall of Purple Lights in the Zhongnanhai Palace in Beijing. The brightly lacquered columns and glazed tiles of the old pleasure pavilion still evoke hours of imperial leisure. Dragons and lions disport themselves among the architecture, and outside the Grand Liquid Sea wrinkles and slides in the listless summer air.

  Sheldon G. Adelson, self-made billionaire, the third-richest man in the United States, turns to his CEO and chuckles. “A very regal-looking environment.” The lights go down, the projector fires up, and Adelson gets ready to make the presentation of his life. He’s trying to get permission to build a Vegas casino made in the image of Venice on the Cotai Strip in Macao. Just like everyone else, he wants to get into China, real bad. “It’ll be like getting the brass ring,” he says.

  Qian Qichen, a vice premier of the People’s Republic of China, is not, perhaps, the most attentive of audiences. He can’t understand much of what Adelson is saying, and the air-conditioning is making him drowsy. Besides, he has already decided what’s going to happen. The pixels of Adelson’s presentation swim before his eyes, and he gives himself up to dreaming of a time when another merchant of the West stood before an oriental potentate in Beijing. It could be a scene by Italo Calvino.

  Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the Emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his. In the lives of emperors there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered . . . It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, that corruption’s gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our sceptre, that the triumph over enemy sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing. Only in Marco Polo’s accounts was Kublai Khan able to discern, through the walls and towers destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termite’s gnawing.

  Qian Qichen allows himself to suppose for a moment that he is Kublai Khan and that Sheldon G. Adelson is constructing Invisible Cities for him in PowerPoint. As photographs and artists’ impressions follow one another, a fruity voice-over tells the stories of Venice and of Vegas.

  “BEGINNINGS,” THE VOICE intones, and the first image appears on the screen: an empty expanse of water. Rivo Alto is just what it’s called, says the voice: a high bank in a desert of brine. The people who live there dig crabs and shellfish from the mud, and they dwell in brick cottages on stilts suspended above the brackish murk. Blocks of marble are set at random into the bricks of their houses, and the citizens of Rivo Alto tell stories about them. “We carried them over the water when we ran away from the barbarians,” they say. “They are the remnants of our former city. They remind us that we were Romans, once upon a time.” They dream that, one day, they will be again.

  On the screen, the watery void dissolves into an image of empty desert, and the voice continues. Ragtown is just that: a ragged encampment set by a well in a sea of sand. Old Helen Stewart has run the place ever since Schuyler Henry shot her man dead in 1884. Her ranch house is built from the remains of the Mormon fort that used to stand there. The Mormons didn’t stay long; the heat and the Indians drove them away. Now old Helen rents out her dusty patch to prospectors. She knows that they’ll need water from her well, and she earns more from them than she’d ever make from trying to grow anything. Sitting around their campfires, they tell one another stories about where they’ve come from. They dream of going home.

  QIAN LOOKS AT Sheldon G. Adelson, self-made billionaire. He was, Qian already knows, once a prospector of sorts himself. Adelson’s parents had come from the Ukraine and Lithuania, and he’d started out real humble—selling newspapers on street corners, toiletry kits by mail order, deicers for windshields. He has no intention of going back to the place he came from.

  Qian is dreaming of a spit of sand in the distant south of the People’s Republic. The Cotai Peninsula is empty of anyone but a few fishermen. They live in simple cottages, digging for crabs and shellfish. He knows they won’t be for long.

  “CONSUMMATION,” THE VOICE intones, and another image appears in the darkness. A beautiful city emerges from the dunes of water where Rivo Alto had once floated in the void.

  The improbable towers and domes of La Serenissima hover like a reverie above the watery heat haze, but it is not a dream; it is Rivo Alto, eight hundred years after its first people arrived there in flight from the barbarians. The air is filled with the cries of stevedores and the clanging of church bells. Marble palaces of every describable color crowd the foaming brine, embroidered with balustrades, cornices, and castellations, fringed by the red and white candy-striped poles to which boatmen moor their craft.

  La Serenissima is beautiful, but it’s also a place to get down to business. The docks in front of the doge’s palace, a gigantic block of pink marzipan dripping with icing, are piled high with the treasures of the Levant. The heads of executed criminals are displayed on richly carved pillars beside it, for the palace is both the treasure house of the republic and its seat of justice. The colorful palaces that ride the waves are the dwellings of merchants, whose galleys are fitted and armed in the Arsenale at the city’s eastern edge.

  Every year the doge casts a golden ring into the water, to renew the marriage of La Serenissima with the element that has served her so well. It isn’t an empty gesture, for all her wealth has come over the sea. Nothing in La Serenissima is an empty gesture; every part of the city performs a function and expresses that purpose with splendor. The customs house, the entrepôt of all the world’s treasures, is surmounted by four Atlases who support a globe on their shoulders. On top of the globe is a bronze image of La Serenissima herself in the guise of Fortune, twisting and turning in the sea breeze.

  Up on the screen, the dunes of water around La Serenissima turn into waves of sand that lap the pleasure domes of another city—the place that used to be Ragtown.

  The improbable towers and pleasure domes of Glitter Gulch wink away in the vast sea of the desert twilight. Around the corner of Tropicana and the Strip is a speeding jam of open-top cars with massive sound systems, full of cheering girls in T-shirts. It’s sixty years since the prospectors pitched their tents on Helen Stewart’s ranch. A cacophony of signs shimmers away up the Strip, neon words promising exotic escape and instant magic: Tropicana, Barbary Coast, Dunes, Desert Inn, Sahara, Hacienda, El Rancho, Stardust, Silver Slipper, Bonanza, Slots-a-Fun.

  A limo pulls off the Strip under one such sign, emblazoned in a vaguely Arabic script with the single word Sands. The car purrs to a halt in the parking lot. The tarmac is flooded with the glow of the casino within: a formless electric twilight, dotted here and there with pools of brightness that suffuse the faces above the green baize with an anticipatory glow.

  The casino floor is known as the “grind joint,” because that’s just what it is: hour after hour the slot machines and the gaming tables grind cash out of the guests. The Sands provides free meals to anyone who’ll stay at the tables long enough, and cheap all-you-can-eats to everyone else. In 1955, one man plays blackjack for twenty-seven hours and wins $77,000. He loses it again instantly, autographing hundred-dollar bills and handing them out to admiring bystanders. The hotel that towers above the casino is only there to give the poor hucksters somewhere to sleep between games. To keep everyone gambling all the time, there are roulette wheels and one-armed bandits by the swimming pool.

  There’s entertainment, too. The Copa lounge is inhabited by “The Most Beautiful Girls in the World,” recruited directly from Hollywood. Tallulah Bankhead has played there, and so have Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Nat King Cole, and Frank Sinatra. Ocean’s Eleven was filmed at the Sands in 1960. It’s all there to keep the ladies happy while their m
en are at the card tables.

  Glitter Gulch is a factory of desire. It is the destination to which the road leads across the desert, the thing that all the flashing signs signify. The citizens of Glitter Gulch remember that once upon a time they were prospecting for gold, and they intend to enjoy every cent of it now.

  QIAN’S ADVISERS HAVE already informed him that Sheldon G. Adelson made his fortune in Glitter Gulch. He built his empire running COMDEX, an annual Las Vegas expo for computer goods. Talk about being in the right place at the right time: COMDEX was so successful in the 1980s that delegates booked all the rooms within a forty-five mile radius of the event. Sheldon G. Adelson bought himself a casino—the Sands—in 1988 and married a new wife the following year. They went to La Serenissima on their honeymoon.

  Qian Qichen is daydreaming about office towers and shopping malls. He was born outside Shanghai; when he was young his parents would take him to the Bund, where they would look across the Yangtze River at empty marshland. Now Pudong bristles with skyscrapers. Qian Qichen imagines the blank sands of the Cotai Strip and wonders if one day they will look the same.

  And then he remembers that he is a vice premier of China and that he has a job to do. He jerks awake and puts his hands on the desk. He eyes Adelson levelly: “Tell me about Steve Wynn.” Adelson’s round face reddens slightly, as it is apt to do when he is pricked. He coughs, and the presentation rolls on.

  “DECADENCE,” SAYS THE disembodied voice, and an eighteenthcentury painting by Canaletto appears in the gloom. A gilded barge floats in the water in front of a pink palace. The water around it is filled with smaller craft, and the steps of the palace are thronged with revelers in silken costumes, their faces hidden behind elaborate masks.

  Carnival roisterers ride the dark waters from palace to palace in search of new pleasures. In a fresco on a ballroom wall Cleopatra dissolves a pearl in vinegar and drinks it, while on a painted ceiling the clowns of the commedia dell’arte disport themselves on swings. Lovers who pretend not to recognize one another hop through the gavotte and arrange assignations sotto voce. Later they embrace in boats plying the dark tangle of canals that lace the city, as the songs of gondoliers echo off the shuttered arcades of silent palaces.

  The revelers rise late to hear Mass in the church of the Scalzi, and peer up at the gilded screen suspended on the wings of laughing cherubs. They wonder whether the beauty of the nuns hidden behind it matches that of their voices. Casanova plots his elopement with one of them. After Mass, friends go to the casino to gossip.

  Once a year the doge still emerges from his pink palace and casts a ring into the waves, to remind his city that once upon a time the riches of the sea paid for the pleasures of the Carnival. They don’t anymore. Canaletto made a fortune from painting the event for the English milordi. He realizes long before anyone else does that the Carnival’s future rests not on water or trade, but on the attractive images that can be conjured out of it.

  The shipyards of the Arsenale have fallen quiet, and the treasures of the Levant no longer spill onto the docks by the doge’s palace. On the last day of the city’s existence, a council is called to determine the future of the place that once was Rivo Alto and became La Serenissima. Few of the aristocratic families bother to turn up. The doge returns to his apartments and hands his glittering insignia to a servant with a wry smile. The party is over.

  “VERY SALUTARY,” SAYS Qian Qichen, “but I asked about Steve Wynn.” Sheldon G. Adelson doesn’t miss a beat, and the slides keep coming. Canaletto’s rich canvas dissolves into an image of Atlantis, where tropical fish swim amid the towers and domes of a submerged civilization.

  The Mirage is a city housed in three golden towers that rise from a lush jungle. Every fifteen minutes a volcano erupts amid the palms, and the air is filled with the tropical scent of piña colada. The people who have gathered to watch the eruption applaud and whoop, and then they wander off to explore. In a giant fishtank at the reception area, sharks and angelfish swarm through the ruins of a sunken city. Dolphins disport themselves in a private sea, and in a secret garden Siegfried and Roy perform magic tricks with the white lions of Timbavati. Of course, to get there, one has to pass the slots and the gaming tables. The Mirage is just what it says it is: an illusion. It’s a grind joint in disguise.

  Those who try to leave the Mirage only encounter more mirages. The bridge to Treasure Island crosses a Caribbean lagoon, around which a ragged village of white houses tumbles down to the water. Two galleons carved with buxom bowsprits are moored by the dock, their rigging and sails torn by tempests. At the same time every evening, a band of dreadlocked pirates defend themselves against a bevy of scantily clad sirens; the sirens always win. After the show the crowds whoop and applaud, and continue over the bridge to the roulette wheels and the fruit machines.

  Those who try to leave Treasure Island only encounter another one. The path to the Wynn winds through tropical foliage to a hidden lake where a thundering waterfall cools the air. Endless corridors are lined with impressionist paintings, exquisite porcelains, and fragments of antiquities. These corridors lead to a golf course whose lush grasses and whispering pines dissolve into the hot desert air. Along the way is shop after designer shop, all “tailored to one lifestyle—yours.” Later, those who’ve played enough golf or bought enough in the boutiques make their way to the theater and watch the Cirque du Soleil perform “Le Rêve.” “Dream with your eyes open,” the billboards say, and that’s just what happens. The dream they are all dreaming is the dream of Steve Wynn.

  QICHEN DOESN’T REALLY need to ask about Steve Wynn; he already knows everything he needs to know. He just did it to make Adelson feel like he was paying attention. Handsome, funny, and clever, Wynn started small, just like everyone else: he ran a bingo parlor in Maryland. After a while he made his way to Glitter Gulch to seek his fortune, working his way up from grind joints to hotels. He seemed to be able to attract the sort who hadn’t been interested in Las Vegas before: respectable family folks from out East with plenty of money.

  And Wynn soon realized that they weren’t coming for the gambling. The Mirage and Treasure Island were considered great risks in the early nineties: they weren’t really casinos but resorts, aimed squarely at Wynn’s well-heeled market. Wynn later said of the Mirage, “Our goal was to build a hotel so overriding in its nature that it would be a reason in and of itself for visitors to come . . . in the same way that Disney attracts visitors to Orlando, Florida.” Like Disney World, the Mirage and Treasure Island were constructed as endless, magnificent, spectacular carnivals. It wasn’t an easy task, but it was well worth the work. “It’s much more difficult to give a party than a roll of quarters,” Wynn explained. “Any damn fool can hand over a roll of quarters, and we have a lot of damn fools handing over rolls of quarters.”

  Qian casts his eye over the Hall of Purple Lights and listens to the murmur of the waves of the Grand Liquid Sea outside. It is ironic, he reflects, that an imperial pleasure palace has become the seat of a regime that once tried to abolish pleasure. Qian remembers the Red Guards stoning the idle songbirds and ripping up the useless grass in the name of the Cultural Revolution. His mind wanders south to the Cotai Strip. It is part of the old Portuguese colony of Macao, which had long been a hedonistic refuge from the People’s Republic before being transferred back to China in 1999. There’s nothing there now, but the Cotai Strip is ripe for pleasure.

  Sheldon G. Adelson is of the same opinion. He is determined that he’ll make it to Cotai before Wynn does. He’s sick of following him around, and Qian knows that he has been for some time. Three years after Adelson bought it, the Sands was looking more and like a losing proposition. It had made its name on the backs of its great entertainers, but by 1991 it couldn’t afford to attract new talent. The president of the hotel said: “What was famous then is not famous today. You can see by the headliners. We are almost a waxwork museum now. There’s nothing new anymore.”

  By comparison with Wynn’s Mi
rage, Adelson’s Sands felt like a dusty truckstop. He wasn’t happy: “Their reception desk looks better than our entire hotel!” He had to do something. On 30 June 1996, the last gamblers were ushered, blinking, out of the artificial gloom of the Sands. For five months the place stood empty; the only visitors were the film crew for Con Air, who resurrected the casino for a week or so and then crashed a plane into it. Then, at 9 p.m. on 26 November 1996, the old neon sign was switched off for the last time, and the Sands crumpled in a cloud of dust.

  The photo of the implosion slides into view on the PowerPoint presentation. It disappears, and the Hall of Purple Lights goes dark for a moment. There is a silence. From the shadows, the rich voice of the narrator speaks: “What stood in its place three years later was someplace else altogether.” A videotape starts to roll before the glazed eyes of Qian Qichen.

  A SELF-MADE AMERICAN billionaire hands a beautiful woman down into a gondola. She turns and smiles at him graciously, and he chuckles a little, because it is Sophia Loren who reclines on the cushion by his aging side. Their gondolier, dressed in a straw hat and a candy-striped shirt, sings to them as he steers his craft through the canals of the Venetian.