Urban Opportunity
COURTESY ALAN HESS
The time is right to dream of the Strip’s next evolution. Now I live here, thanks to a fellowship at the Black Mountain Institute. I arrived in August from Poland via London, and the jet lag woke me my first morning at 4:30. What matter? This is the authentic 24-hour city, where all is available all the time. I watched the rising sun throw rose light on the mountains. Vast wildernesses full of fantastical shapes lay beyond the city limits like a collective unconscious. The big Western skies looked full of possibility. It seemed, and still does, a place where you have the time and the room to make up your life as you live it. I liked it immediately. I am not alone in this, of course. People have come and stayed for work, but also for the dry air, the dream that a few seconds can forever change your fortunes, the simple ease of living in a full-service city with daily sunshine and the full range of what Puritan America loathes and withholds. As Simone de Beauvoir said, “No bourgeoisie, no bourgeois morality.” What will become of this fantasyland in the desert? The flimsiness of its foundations invites conjecture about its future. I’ve heard it said that ghost towns in Nevada outnumber functioning ones by a ratio of 20 to 1 and that Las Vegas will become one of the former. What could make it so? Lack of water. Continuing economic catastrophe. The streets becoming meaner, more predatory. This is a city that panders to every human weakness and then spits out those who succumb to them. Some fall to the pavements, others all the way into the storm drains. Add to this the colossal number of mortgage foreclosures and a quadrupling of the unemployment rate. These are facts that lead to social disintegration, to illness, to rage and to the rise of gangs. And it is a city that has never entirely cohered. What I’ve noticed here more than anything is how ephemeral is the concept of citizenship or collective regional identity. The city has no professional sports team or central focus. It has the worst public transport system I’ve seen, and I imagine the social services infrastructure is not much better. This does not matter greatly in boom times, but a sense of community is a salvation when things become more harsh. A place has a better chance of surviving if those living in it think it is right and natural to look after each other. As it is, if Las Vegas starts to look like a desert Detroit, many will walk away without looking back. But the dream of a fresh start in the West still pulls in America. It is still big and open here. And Las Vegas has changed in the last decade. The university has grown. Corporations have arrived. The city no longer feeds exclusively on the bounty provided by the Strip. And increasing numbers of its people have been born, raised, educated and employed here. They have a stake in it in terms of their identities. They are the kinds of people who start bands, flower shops, political action groups, factories, theaters and all the other things that make cities cohere and develop. Guessing the future is a game of chance of little consequence. I’d be reluctant to put all my chips on either the future abandonment or prosperity of Las Vegas, but since this is the game I’ve agreed to play I will make a cautious bet on more random financial imploding, followed by slow growth into a more stable and ethnically and economically diverse city, with some surprising and innovative intellectual and cultural additions to the menu of services it provides.
By Alan Hess
Calamities can be good for you. The Chicago fire in 1871 spurred that raw, upstart city to invent the skyscraper and cultivate great architects such as Louis Sullivan. In rebuilding, Chicago blazed a trail into the 20th century. So the Crash of 2008 offers Las Vegas a chance over the next 10 years to step back, take a breath and concentrate on its strengths as the most innovative suburban metropolis in the country. Let’s focus on one aspect: the public spaces where people stroll, mingle and gather. Venice has Piazza San Marco. Manhattan has Fifth Avenue. Paris has the ChampsElysées. Over the past two decades the Strip’s intricate urban fabric of sidewalks, fountains, shopping arcades, monorails, pleasure gardens and sidewalk cafés, set against a backdrop of stunning vistas by day and night, has become the most original, organic and appealing promenade in the world. The Strip has reinvented public space for the 21st century. It is Las Vegas’ true downtown—but it has a ways to go. The Strip is so far ahead of all the planning experts and their conventional theories that it’s often
Instead of building more monstrous high-rises, the Strip could complete its vision as an urban district over the next 10 years. not recognized for what it has achieved. No one predicted that the auto-oriented Strip of 1960 would be thronged with pedestrians in 2010. Still, the responses to this evolution have been a bit hit and miss so far; to tell the truth, many Las Vegas architects may not entirely realize what they have been creating. The best examples are the piazza and terraces in front of the Venetian, the lakeside restaurants at Bellagio and
the sidewalk cafés at Paris. These imaginative solutions contrast with the congested sidewalks in front of the Flamingo and the Imperial Palace, and the narrow, precarious walkways along the looming cliffs of Planet Hollywood and CityCenter. So here’s the potential silver lining in the current economic lull: Instead of building more monstrous high-rises, the Strip could complete its vision as an urban district over the next 10 years. The bleaching skeleton of the Echelon, for example, could be revamped by adding a generous suburban plaza that advances the lessons taught by the Venetian, Bellagio and Paris. That would reactivate the declining north end of the Strip by attracting crowds with the simple urban delights of people-watching and taking in the view—and draw them into the casinos, restaurants and shops for some business. Of course, this will take a renewal of Las Vegas’ self-confidence. But Las Vegas at its best has always been ahead of its time. Until recent years it never followed other cities’ leads. From neon signs to hotel-casinos, from Billy Wilkerson to Steve Wynn, Las Vegas’ best ideas have been bred locally, not imported. That’s where the Strip’s future greatness will come from, too. Alan Hess is a Los Angeles-based architecture critic, lecturer and author whose books include Viva Las Vegas: After-Hours Architecture.
Timothy O’Grady is the author of six books, including the recently published Divine Magnetic Lands. J A N U A R Y - F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 0 D e s e r t C o m pa n i o n 27