Neon Metropolis: How Las Vegas Started the Twenty-First Century - Softcover

Rothman, Hal

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0415926130 ISBN 13: 9780415926133

Verlag: Routledge, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

Praise for the Previous Edition (0 415 92612 2): ...lively and provocative...this book will teach you something startling on nearly every page... --The New York Times Book Review Like the Emerald City, Las Vegas glitters brightly in the vast Nevada desert, a haven for refugees from ordinary America. A hip, iconic, playground that exports nothing, it nonetheless earns billions from consumer services alone -- gambling, hotels, gaming, and entertainment. It is, historian Hal Rothman argues, the quintessential city of the future. As other cities try to mirror its success and huge, respectable corporations like Coca-Cola invest in a piece of the pie, the very traits that have ostracized Las Vegas in the past -- hedonism, money worship, and permissiveness -- have today made it America's fastest growing urban center. From the gambling-driven, mob-run Sin City of the 1940s to the corporatization of the Strip as a respectable family entertainment center after the 1970s, Las Vegas has shown incredible economic resilience and adaptability. The first full account of America's new dream capital, Neon Metropolis brilliantly shows how Las Vegas gambled on the post-industrial service economy well before the rest of the country knew it was coming, and won.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Hal Rothman is a professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and the editor of the journal Environmental History. The author of Devil's Bargains:Tourism in the Twentieth Century American West, Rothman is a frequent commentator on Las Vegas. He has been featured on National Public Radio, CBS Sunday Morning, and in The New York Times,The Wall Street Journal and in the four-hour A&E Television Network documentary, LasVegas.

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Neon Metropolis

How Las Vegas Started the Twenty-First CenturyBy Hal Rothman

Routledge

Copyright © 2003 Hal Rothman
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0415926130

Chapter One

Inventing Modern Las Vegas

The numbers are there, but they don't mean much. How do youexplain a town that began as a railroad land auction in 1905, reached eightthousand in 1940, and topped one million people in 1995? There's noprecedent for Las Vegas, no way to put its experience into the framework ofother American cities. Distinct from the American whole, away from thearrows of progress and prosperity, Las Vegas was an insignificant part of thegreat government-industry matrix that defined the twentieth century. Noset of circumstances led to Las Vegas. It didn't have fertile land or richmineral veins; railroads didn't meet, highways didn't cross there. Banksdidn't seek out Las Vegas, developers didn't fashion it into the next paradise,corporations didn't come to the desert to establish new headquarters,and people certainly didn't come looking for the little oasis to put downroots. Las Vegas's attractiveness was lost on Americans until after WorldWar II and to the mainstream until well after 1975.

The reasons are obvious. Las Vegas was nowhere, a "miserable dinky littleoasis town," the mobster Meyer Lansky supposedly called it, and withouttransportation that made it easy to reach or air-conditioning to make the staybearable, Las Vegas's appeal was as seasonal as any ski resort. Before 1945, ithad little to recommend it. Las Vegas had no markets, no hinterland to colonize. Even today, nearby St. George and southern Utah, heavily Mormon,look north to Salt Lake City; Kingman, Arizona, is a highway crossroads ofits own; Flagstaff is fast becoming a suburb of Phoenix; and Barstow occupiesits own dystopic universe. Las Vegas did not even have enough water to makeit prey for Los Angeles. At its twentieth-century birth, Las Vegas was podunk,weak, and dependent, an inconsequential speck on the map.

The new town was typical of the small-town West. Modern Las Vegasbegan atop the remains of a nineteenth-century Mormon settlement thatleft only a few cantankerous ranchers. It started as a railroad town, a repairshop for the San Pedro, Los Angeles, and Salt Lake Railroad. Like so manyother places in the West, its sustenance came from the rails, and when theyprospered, as they did with the opening of the silver mines in Bullfrog andRhyolite before 1910, so did the town. By 1910, Fremont Street, the heartof the old downtown, was paved, guttered, and flagged with sidewalks, andten miles of local dirt road had been oiled to reduce the dust. The companybuilt sixty-four workers' cottages and offered easy terms to workers whowanted to build their own. When the railroad's fortunes dipped, so did thetown's. A track washout in 1910 sent the population spiking downwardfrom twelve hundred to eight hundred. Only an upsurge in regional fortunesredirected the number upward. A pattern that typified the rural Westin this period and ever after defined Las Vegas was set: the town wasdependent on decisions made in other places.

Las Vegas's circumstances mirrored the history of the state. Nevada hasalways been a colony, dependent on the whims and needs of other larger,more powerful states, some adjacent like California, others farther away.Shoehorned into the Union to guarantee Abraham Lincoln's reelection in1864, Nevada enjoyed the privilege of statehood at the cost of its dignity and,some said, its independence. Some nineteenth-century senators fromNevada never lived in the state. Some of those who did never bothered toattend the Senate. Nevada may be the only state in the union that faced thegenuine prospect of losing its statehood. By 1900, the state's population hadso dwindled that its status was in question. Representative Francis Newlands,a Californian who transcended the carpetbagger label, decided that farmerswould save the state. In 1902, he engineered the Reclamation Act, whichcreated the Reclamation Service, later the Bureau of Reclamation, toimpound water for yeoman farmers. The bureau became a dam-buildingmonstrosity, a remarkable example of what political scientists call the "irontriangle" that took on a life of its own. Despite Newlands's intentions, theReclamation Act created a new colonial master for Nevada, a federal agencythat controlled the most basic need of an arid state.

For two decades, Las Vegas was a simple small western town. Its mainindustry was the Union Pacific, which bought out the San Pedro, LosAngeles, and Salt Lake in 1921, kept the maintenance shop, and becamemaster of the railroad town, responsible for its infrastructure as well as forits open social climate. Las Vegas had all the virtues and vices of such places.It was tough, raw, and sometimes mean. The rules of high-tone Americanot only did not apply, they simply didn't exist. Like many similar towns,Las Vegas did not explicitly forbid prostitution. As long as it was confinedto one square block, block 16 of the original town plat, "quasi-legal" bestdefined its status. Railroad flat restricted gambling, legal in Nevada untilProgressive reformers barred it in 1910 in a prohibition that lasted until1931 and alcohol to the same area. Illegal but only in a technical sense, suchactivities were part of the compact the railroad made when it created townsthat functioned like the port cities of yore. The railroad brought life and ittacitly condoned behavior at odds with Victorian norms. Railroad companieswell understood the advantages and drawbacks of the rails, and townsthat grew up along them made accommodation, even in the most moralisticof times.

Las Vegas's circumstances were typical of the rural West and even morecharacteristic of railroad towns. The railroad provided a capital regime; itwas the only consistent source of funding for the town, and its goals determinedthose of the city. Much like the cattle trade of the nineteenth century,the rails brought a rowdy element with plenty of cash and a feeling ofmobility. Workers lived in Las Vegas, but travelers passed through, and thesense of movement along the rails freed people from place and time. Viceflourished and became an integral part of local commerce. Although stillconsidered not quite proper, it was recognized as necessary. Catering toother people's desires proved so lucrative that even the most upright small-townburghers held their noses and looked away, as they had in the cattletowns. The accommodation made life palatable. Without vice there wasn'tenough business to eke out a living.

This condition reflected a larger theme in the state's history. WhileNevada liked to bill itself as the Old West, where the rules of modern civilizationdidn't apply, it was equally true that the state had few choices.Neither of its two nineteenth-century industries, mining and railroads,encouraged stability. Mining exploded on the landscape, peaked in greatrushes, then left huge visible scars as testimony to its transience. The railroadepitomized nineteenth-century mobility, defying the rooted ideals ofthe time. Its reputation in American folklore for encouraging transienceand license and freedom inspired generations of songwriters and otherartists. The state embraced these industries because it had no other choice.If Nevadans seemed more willing to mind their own business than most,this incipient libertarianism was a product of the limits of its land andinfrastructure in a harsh climate.

One-owner towns had their drawbacks for the people who lived inthem. Even though they allowed locals considerable autonomy and leeway,outside power maintained tremendous control. Early...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Routledge
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2003
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0415926130
• ISBN 13: 9780415926133
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 376
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