Las Vegas " SO, was it at the Graceland Chapel with the Elvis impersonator?" I've heard this question more than once, asked with raised eyebrows and a chuckle after an acquaintance learns I was married in Las Vegas. Surprise yields to amazement when they learn that the ceremony was not only held in an Episcopal cathedral, but was also conducted by a priest who as far as I know declines to don a white rhinestone-studded jumpsuit, even in private.
You see, Las Vegas, the ultimate transient metropolis, is my hometown. The city celebrated its centenary this year--it was born with an auction of downtown railroad land in 1905. But it seems to me that Las Vegas has been more often celebrated by its visitors--drawn by the advertising slogan that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas--than by its residents. We stayed. My family has been there for 75 of those 100 years. People usually wonder why. Were they mobsters? Entertainers? Well, no, which is not to say that my family doesn't have its entertaining element.
My mother's family is LDS, and came with many other Mormons (and non-Mormons) to live in Las Vegas in the early 1930s. They were from a prominent Mormon clan--my grandmother was the eldest daughter of the first of her father's five wives (simultaneous, not sequential as might be the case today). With the nation locked in Depression, there were opportunities for work in southern Nevada. At that time, the Las Vegas area was home to about 5,000 residents, a 20-bed hospital with one doctor and one nurse, and a cluster of businesses of various sorts around Fremont Street. Winter in Las Vegas is cool but dry and pleasant. Summer is not. Temperatures regularly exceed 105 and on some days 115. Since residential air conditioning was not available until well into the 1950s, some families, including my mother's, would move out of town for the hottest months of the summer. Anyone left sought refuge in a movie theater, I suppose, since theaters had commercial cooling. People routinely slept outdoors.
My grandfather, "Heinie" Stevenson, decamped to Las Vegas in 1930 in advance of the family to inspect opportunities, and stayed with his sister, my Great Aunt Lillian, perhaps the most interesting member of the cast. The family moved in 1931, in time for my mother and her brother and sister to start school.
Aunt Lillian in her later years was a voracious bridge player in a house filled with oriental carpets and art objects from her travels. She must have been something in 1925 when, as a 35-year-old widow (her first husband died in China in about 1922--they were tourists there, and he fell ill) she married A.B. Witcher, then 53, who had mining, financial, and political interests in the bustling burg of Ely, Nevada. They left for Las Vegas in 1927 or '28, under "pressure," say some, and began investing in Las Vegas real estate. With a partner, Prosper J. Goumond (also from Ely and with some "professional" experience in Midwest gambling), they established the Boulder Club on Fremont Street a year later. Witcher, Aunt Lillian, and my grandfather were instrumental in the successful effort to legalize gambling, passed by the Nevada legislature in March 1931. Witcher lobbied legislators while my grandfather drove Lillian to Carson City with petitions from the Las Vegas area supporting legalization. Today, that's a speedy 450 miles on the desert highways; with the "roads" that then existed, it took two days.
Shouldn't everyone have a business partner named "Prosper"? And prosper they did. The Goumond house had the first private swimming pool in town, fed by an artesian well. Today, of course, almost everyone in Las Vegas has a pool as a way of coping with the hot summer weather.
The real birth of modern Las Vegas--and of a turn in my family's fortunes--should be dated to 1931. Gambling was legalized, the (permissive) six-week residency requirement for divorce was enacted, and the government began building Hoover Dam. The 1931 Gaming Act was unusual for that time only in its breadth. With the Depression, several other states had liberalized gaming laws at about the same time as a way to raise revenue and boost the economy, but they limited the activity to bingo and race wagering--unlimited casino operations were beyond the pale for other jurisdictions.
Witcher and Goumond's Boulder Club, along with the other original Fremont Street clubs, did well with the business from Hoover Dam, and later from the military, as well as a nascent tourist industry from (mostly) California. Tom Wolfe famously observed that "Las Vegas is the only town in the world whose skyline is made up neither of buildings like New York, nor of trees, . . . but signs." So it may be of more than passing interest that the Boulder Club installed the first Fremont Street neon sign in 1945, built by the Young Electric Sign Company. Young Electric's neon signs for the Eldorado Club, the Golden Nugget, and others followed in 1948, and Vegas Vic, the 75-foot mechanical cowboy, was installed in 1951.
Today, part of that neon history is preserved on a small scale, interspersed among the peddlers at the Fremont Street Experience, a pedestrian mall. My favorite is the martini glass from the Red Barn, which was the--shhhh--gay bar in town when I was growing up. Yes, there was a gay bar. One. Yes, it was giggle-inducing to 12-year-olds. Yes, even in Las Vegas.
The Boulder Club provided steady work for my grandfather during the Depression and beyond. He kept the books, did the payroll, and wired the lighting. He retired from his position as "the guy who knows everything" at 70 in 1963, the year I was born. The Boulder Club prospered for a few more years after Witcher's death in 1946, with other investors moving in. Then the club had a disastrous fire in 1956, about the time Benny Binion was interested in expanding his Horseshoe club into the adjacent property. So the Boulder Club lived on, in a way, as a landlord to the Horseshoe. I can remember occasions as a child in the 1970s when people from Binion's Horseshoe would call on my grandfather to ask how something in the old Boulder Club space worked. My grandfather gave me an antique slot machine from the club, a novelty Buckley Bars machine that pays on lemons. It sits in our sunroom now, an object of curiosity for the Virginia neighbors.
The Boulder Club name may no longer be familiar to those outside Vegas, but everyone has heard of Binion's Horseshoe thanks to the poker craze of recent years. Benny Binion opened the Horseshoe in what had been the Eldorado Club in 1951, establishing it as the "fancy spot" along Fremont Street by installing carpet and guaranteeing to cover any bet, no matter the amount. As a convicted felon, Binion lost his gaming license in the 1950s and became a "consultant" to the Horseshoe. He liked poker (casinos usually didn't offer it, since it takes up valuable floor space) and acquired the World Series of Poker in 1970, making it a winner-take-all game open to anyone with the $10,000 stake. In 2002, the World Series of Poker had 7,595 entries and $19,599,230 in prize money, not to mention the millions of fans attracted by the coverage on ESPN.
Binion's World Series made "Texas hold'em" a household name, but time has not been so kind to the Horseshoe. The senior Binion passed away on Christmas Day 1989, and the junior Binions fell into what you might call profound management differences. Daughter Becky Behnen assumed control in June 1998 from brothers Jack and Ted Binion. Ted died a few months later from a drug overdose, an apparent murder for which his girlfriend (a former exotic dancer) and her married (to someone else) lover were tried twice before acquittal. (The girlfriend was first represented by then-defense attorney and now mayor of Las Vegas Oscar Goodman, and later by Alan Dershowitz.) Part of the reason Ted Binion's death might have seemed suspicious is that said married lover was found in the desert, a night or two after Ted's demise, excavating Binion's silver vault containing an estimated $10 million in rare coins.
Meanwhile, the Horseshoe did not prosper. Short on cash, the owners liquidated a popular display of $1 million in $10,000 bills. Its reserves (the amount of cash a casino legally must have on hand to cover bets) ran below state requirements. The casino fell behind on payments to the power company, employee health care providers, landowners (including my family), and the unions, among others. Under this accumulated pressure, the Horseshoe was forced to close its doors in January 2004. It was sold to the Harrah's chain, which kept the "Horseshoe" name and the World Series of Poker, and sold the rest to MTR Gaming. Since March 2005, MTR has operated the downtown site as "Binion's." But poker has moved on. I was surprised when a recent New York Times Magazine article about Las Vegas poker champions made no mention of the Horseshoe.
ALTHOUGH FAMOUS as a tourist destination, the city may ultimately make history as the fastest-growing place ever. When I graduated from high school in the early '80s, there were about 470,000 people living in the Las Vegas area. A decade later, there were about 742,000. Estimates from mid-2004 placed the population at 1.6 million.
The growth was so dramatic that, of the 346 census tracts for the Las Vegas metro area, 301 were wholly new in the 2000 census. Massive new suburban enclaves have been built to house the arrivals, and with a job growth rate of 5.2 percent, people keep coming. Posh, gated neighborhoods occupy the desert where my parents and I would go hunting for arrowheads and petroglyphs. But despite popular views to the contrary, Las Vegas is not the poster city for sprawl--it is more densely developed than Portland, Oregon, a town embraced by the smart growth set. And it is getting denser: The average census tract in Las Vegas grew 41 percent more dense in the 1990s, while in Portland the figure was 25.6 percent.
The keys to the growth of the Las Vegas valley have always been water and power. The power came from the dam and from coal-burning power plants in Utah. The water came from artesian wells and the Colorado River. Here, my late father, Pete Rittenhouse, makes an appearance. He was an attorney specializing in mining, water, and probate matters. He was born in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania, which in the 1930s was roughly the same size as Las Vegas at about 5,000 residents--and is roughly the same size today. After arriving in Las Vegas in 1951, he ascended to the highest reaches of law practice and served as assistant U.S. attorney and U.S. attorney for Nevada during the Eisenhower administration from 1954-58. (There were only three attorneys in the office; I am told that among other official achievements, they wiretapped suspected mobsters.) In private practice, he represented an assortment of mining and water interests, and served as the Water District's counsel during the negotiation of the Southern Nevada Water Project in the 1960s, a necessary precursor to the growth of the city.
My family at first lived in a postwar cinder-block house like those that populate most of the suburbs of Los Angeles and other western cities. While I was in preschool, however, my parents built a custom home in what my mother calls "Arizona territorial" style, with lots of redwood and a beige brick called slumpstone. The architect, Bob Fielden, is still active in Las Vegas and has designed a number of public buildings, but remains frustrated that designers there aren't more conscious of their surroundings--perhaps a side effect of the rapid growth. "Las Vegas," he says, "has become a photocopy for every prototype structure built everywhere else in the world. All of the suburban development, all of the new condos, all of the strip malls are copies of buildings originally designed for other locales. There is little if anything that reflects the natural environment of the Mojave Desert." Fielden's daughter, Laura Spina (a friend of mine from junior high school), adds that with the incredible population growth in Las Vegas, design is inevitably done by "firms from out of town or who have recently moved here for the big boom. They rarely understand the intensities of our arid environment. A perfect example is a bank that was completely constructed of black glass. Can you imagine what their cooling bills are like?"
Like many Las Vegas homeowners, my parents landscaped their large backyard in grass that resembles a golf course (lawns are cool and comfortable). This has placed high demands on the water supply. Local water authorities are now trying to break Las Vegans of their addiction to turf. Ordinances prohibit front lawns in new construction, and a local commission will pay owners of existing lawns $1 per square foot of lawn replaced with Xeriscape. If she decided to move to cactus and gravel, my mother could get over $10,000 for her lawn, certainly more than it would fetch on eBay. Given the enormous growth in the area, the water savings from such measures are not trivial.
Can Las Vegas continue to grow? Skeptics predict the end is near. But as noted to me by Bob Naylor, a former California legislator, chairman of the California Republican party, and eminent Sacramento government attorney--who also happens to be a member of Las Vegas High School's class of 1962--those doubts are nothing new. "After almost every hotel building boom since the fifties, conventional wisdom had it that the town just could not attract enough tourists to justify any more hotels," recalls Naylor. "They keep saying that, and new hotel booms keep happening." Tourism isn't the only fuel for growth. "Las Vegas and Nevada have benefited incalculably by having no income tax and relying on revenues from gambling. Californians leave behind gambling losses, Nevada keeps its taxes low, and all kinds of businesses flee California's high tax [and regulatory] regime to open shop in Nevada." Naylor predicts: "Look for that to continue as long as there is land."
AMONG MY EARLIEST MEMORIES are trips to the grocery store with my mother. Visitors are surprised that the grocery stores in Las Vegas all contain slot machines. We regularly shopped at Vegas Village, a grocery store combined with a Wal-Mart-esque dry goods store and liquor department. The bank of slot machines at the entrance was a veritable casino. It seemed like the same clique of ladies held forth there whenever we went shopping. I recall lots of puffy hair, long nails, and cigarettes. A local attorney and poet, Dayvid Figler, once quipped that the official snack food of Las Vegas is the cigarette, and he's right.
Slot machine arcades remain a staple alongside the Fritos and band-aids in most chain and convenience stores, not to mention in pubs, restaurants, and that casino-with-occasional-air-service known as McCarran International Airport. Despite what some people may expect, national chains like Rite-Aid or Safeway aren't the gaming licensee--subject to the vigorous and necessarily invasive scrutiny of the Gaming Commission and the Gaming Control Board.
Instead, space in stores is leased to independent concessioners screened and licensed with the state. One of the largest operators of grocery-store slot arcades is Herbst Gaming. The company's slot machine "route operations" manage 6,800 machines. This business yielded operating income of $44.7 million in 2004, according to their filings with the SEC.
Herbst Gaming is managed by the three Herbst brothers--the middle one, Tim, I remember from Mrs. Smith's first grade class at West Charleston Elementary School. Unfortunately for Tim and his family, and like many native Las Vegans, neither my mother nor I gamble, at the grocery store or anywhere else. The vision one gets from popular essays such as Tom Wolfe's "Las Vegas (What?)" of locals wandering the clubs with Dixie cups of coins pulling slot machine handles may be true for people who live in Las Vegas temporarily, but a casual poll I took of my friends and acquaintances from "permanent" Las Vegas suggests that we gamble rarely, if at all.
Las Vegas appeals to outsiders as a safe harbor of libidinous freedom. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, right? Las Vegas should be the headquarters of the Leave-Us-Alone coalition, shouldn't it? The late Murray Rothbard, eminent libertarian scholar, after all, did end up as a distinguished professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
But Las Vegas would have remained a dusty train depot had it not been for massive support from the federal government. Hoover Dam, the Bombing and Gunnery Range, Nellis Air Force Base, and federal power and water projects all brought people to the valley and gave them a tolerable place to live. Why Las Vegas? In a transcript from an interview with a local oral history project, Ed Von Tobel, from one of the city's first families, noted that many of the federal projects "could have gone elsewhere. They could have gone to Reno or they could have gone to anywhere, to Salt Lake City." Luckily for Las Vegas, they didn't. To be sure, luck comes to the well-prepared town. When federal spending is at issue, the best preparation is Beltway influence, and Nevada, for its size, has seen its share of heavy-hitting senators, Paul Laxalt (1974-87), Howard Cannon (1959-83), and Pat McCarran (1932-54), to name three. Attitude and acceptance matter, too. Nevada was able to accommodate the atomic testing at the Nevada Test Site with nonchalance. Bob Naylor told me he remembers delivering newspapers on his bike in the predawn hours and seeing the sky light up like daytime with the atmospheric detonation of a nuclear bomb 90 miles north of Las Vegas.
Will Las Vegas's luck run out? Its attractions initially depended on restrictive social regulations everywhere else in the country. While tourists still enjoy the camp novelty of the "Las Vegas wedding," throngs of unhappy couples no longer depend on Nevada for a no-fault six-week divorce. Efforts to liberalize marriage laws by extending them to homosexuals have gained no traction--none--in Las Vegas, and the Nevada constitution now defines marriage as between a man and a woman.
With the growth of casino gaming in other states (not to mention on the Internet), a time will come when Las Vegas-style gambling is within anyone's reach. It isn't possible to build Yosemite or Maui just anywhere; it is possible, though, to build a casino wherever there is electricity, water, and a road. On the other hand, you can build an amusement park anywhere, too, and for some reason the Disney properties in Orlando and Anaheim keep rolling along, year after year. So Las Vegas may remain a popular destination because it gives people a place to misbehave temporarily, and has acquired a cachet reflected in Steve Wynn's maxim that "anything that is worth doing is worth OVER-doing." One sign Vegas will continue as the place to let your inner skank run free is the enormous investment at present in condominium towers--marketed as second homes for people who want to golf all day and play all night.
Still, communities outside Nevada are liberalizing gambling and other vice-related regulations. Even staid Virginia has relaxed the Sunday prohibition on liquor sales in the regions nearest Washington, D.C. (in an effort to capture some of that valuable Sunday scotch-and-soda trade). If we find "Las Vegas" in more and more other places, what does that mean for the rest of you? How well can other communities adapt to this kind of activity?
One of the secrets of Las Vegas is that a den of libertine iniquity only works when subject to massive regulation. That pretty escort or topless dancer has been through a background check to get a sheriff's card that allows her to take that job. (So has the maid and the waitress, a point that justifiably sticks in the craw of many working-class Las Vegans.) State authorities keep a blacklist of persons who, because of cheating or ties with undesirables, may not enter a casino that is otherwise open to the public. The city has done a good job of hiding the web of law enforcement and surveillance it casts over gambling and other "adult" activities. Las Vegas may make it look easy, but it isn't.
Multinational corporate owners, with shareholders and regulatory overseers, have replaced the Las Vegas of Midwestern organized crime syndicates. But that took some doing, and over the years Las Vegas had its share of problems that now feed the legend that brings tourists. In my lifetime, I remember when a local attorney and family friend perished after someone rigged explosives to his car. The crime was never solved.
Finally, "gaming" can be a harmless diversion for some, but when high stakes play is available it also attracts desperate people anxious to hit it big, and the kind who prey upon them. Liberalizing local laws is one way to find out who's who in your town, but you might not like what you learn. You also might not like the fact that gambling is a very seductive way to concentrate wealth. Even a Nevada libertarian might have trouble with that.
Allison R. Hayward is an attorney and writer in the Washington, D.C., area. She is working on a book about campaign finance regulation, and her thoughts on that topic, as well as others, can be found at www.skepticseye.com.