Embedded Files
Volume 2 | Issue 5 - Money
Article by Marcus Clark. Edited by Tom Hercock. Additional Research by Helen Midgley.
‘With its super-size skyline and facsimile architecture of pyramids, castles and Greco-Roman monuments, Las Vegas strikes as a prime example of a landscape without place or past. This neon shrine to escapism, commercialism, excess and hedonism in the Nevada desert speaks of fantasy, entertainment tourism and play.’[1]
Las Vegas is a glowing beacon of hideous gaudiness. When it sleeps the American dream lingers and flashes in its mind as 37 million people rotate through its collective casino doors every year. A sore thumb in the Nevada Desert, America on ecstasy. That old school American showbiz ideal resonates from every nightclub and hotel theatre. Sinatra is King. The city’s foundations built on crime and the money flows like milk and honey. CSI’s use mind-bending quasi futuristic technology to catch the murderer or murderers every week on a seemingly unfathomably expansive federal budget. But when did it begin? When did it ink itself onto the desert landscape like a neon tattoo? It’s difficult to imagine the beginning of Las Vegas, as Karen Jones wrote, it’s a landscape without place or past.
The legalisation of gambling in Nevada in 1931 probably had something to do with it, but this didn’t ever guarantee that what Las Vegas is now would ever come to fruition. Until the mid forties it was a simple desert town, a necessary go through on route 91 to the sun, sand, and sea of California. It was only in the 1940s that major development cemented Las Vegas’ potential from the orders of the underworld. In 1946 New York’s crime boss elite Frank Costello and Meyer Lansky sent Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel to create the first instances of Mafia investment and control in Las Vegas, and experiment with its possibilities. And so the ‘Flamingo’ was born in a pink flurry of blood money and named after Siegel’s pet name for his mistress. This was the first brick that would transform route 91, the Nevada Strip, beyond recognition but many more were to follow.
Six months later Siegel was dead due to a desired change of management from New York. 1952 to 1957 spawned the 'Sahara’, the ‘Sands’, the ‘New Frontier’, the ‘Royal Nevada’, the Showboat, the Riviera, the ‘Fremont’, Binion’s Horseshoe, and lastly the ‘Tropicana’. By 1954 over 8 million people were visiting Las Vegas a year. The criminally rich were getting richer and it was legal. If you’ve ever seen ‘The Simpsons’ episode ‘$pringfield (or How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love Legalised Gambling)’ in which Monty Burns creates a casino in Springfield and subsequently goes a bit wrong, well its a reference to Howard Hughes. In 1966 he moved to Las Vegas, after refusing to vacate his hotel room he bought the hotel, and with the use of his vast enterprise, powerful connections and astounding wealth he took over many of the more wealthy casinos that had links to organised crimes and helped change the aesthetics of Las Vegas from its traditional old West image to a city of more cosmopolitan vestiges.
The idea of Las Vegas built on organised crime may have been superseded by more mainstream commercial interests, however behind the glitzy veneer of the increasingly salubrious establishments that now litter the Strip, the same motivations that inspired the Mafia to invest in Vegas remain unchanged. Casinos remain extremely profitable businesses, and the success of Hughes in moving Vegas away from the underworld has resulted in the city achieving a degree of respectability, an acceptable monument to vice within a nation famed for its conservative foundations. Las Vegas has become synonymous with gambling, a replacement for the California gold rush within the American psyche, a place of pilgrimage for those looking make their fortune. However, for the majority of those who are drawn in by the lure of riches, the reality of Las Vegas is one of a city built upon the broken dreams of the masses. It might not be immediately obvious when looking at the opulent interior of the Bellagio or the glamour of Caesar’s Palace, but beneath the riches of the casinos lurks the ‘true’ Las Vegas. Nevada has the highest rate of homelessness in the USA, and as the state’s most populous city, a large part of this can be attributed to Vegas. Many of the city’s homeless make their homes in the storm drains that criss cross beneath the neon lit streets above. In this way they are hidden from view and the casinos are able to continue to perpetuate the illusion of Vegas as a city dedicated solely to luxury and indulgence. However, the casinos cannot hide the harsh realities that are the individual toll of a city built upon the impoverishment of the masses; the suicide rate is among the highest in the U.S and visitors are more than twice as likely to kill themselves in Vegas than anywhere else. The city of sin continues to consume the dreams and desires of those who are drawn into its thrall – the house always wins.
[1] Karen Jones, ‘The Old West in Modern Splendour: Frontier Folklore and the Selling of Las Vegas’, European Journal of American Culture, 29 (2010), p.93.
*****
Nevada, the state of Las Vegas, actually outlawed gambling on 1st October 1910, to the extent that the western tradition of coin-flipping (to price drinks) was forbidden.
However, Las Vegas soon established illegal gambling dens which would flourish until 1931, when the state legislature would overturn the laws against gambling.
Howard Hughes (1905-1976) died a reclusive, eccentric billionaire, but lived as a film maker, Casanova-figure, aeroplane designer, land speed record holder, and political intriguer.
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