For its razor-edge finesse in harnessing sheer, magnificent
excess to the deadly serious business of making money, there's no
place like the Strip. Little more than fifty years ago, as Hwy-51,
Las Vegas Boulevard was just a dusty desert thoroughfare, scattered
with the occasional edge-of-town motel as it set off south toward
California. Now, as a four-mile showcase of the most extravagant
architecture on earth, it's a tourist destination in its own right,
surpassed only by Orlando as the most popular in the US.
Las Vegas was not the first city to acquire an ever-lengthening
"strip" of new businesses as it expanded along a single straight
line. In fact Las Vegas Boulevard got its nickname because it
reminded former LA police captain Guy McAfee of Sunset Strip back
home. McAfee moved to Las Vegas in 1938, after being obliged to
resign as commander of LA's vice squad merely because he controlled
a string of illegal gambling joints. He took over the
Pair-O-Dice Club , which had recently opened as Las Vegas
Boulevard's first casino. During the next ten years, it was joined
by El Rancho , the first real resort, in 1941; the Last
Frontier in 1942, which in due course incorporated the
Pair-O-Dice ; Bugsy Siegel's legendary Flamingo in
1946; and the Thunderbird in 1948.
For casino owners, much of the appeal of the nascent Strip was
that it lay outside the city limits of Las Vegas proper. Instead it
was in Clark County, where they completely dominated what little
political life there was, and were thus spared the legal and
financial scrutiny suffered by their rivals downtown. Their control
of the county machine enabled them to resist repeated attempts to
bring the Strip under the jurisdiction of the city authorities, and
they've been free to pursue untrammeled development ever since.
While the essential spur for every innovation on the Strip
remains the desire of each casino to attract gamblers, seduction
strategies have changed over the years. When most Las Vegas
visitors drove up from California, the Strip was entirely geared
toward motorists. Until the 1980s, roadside signs advertising
lodging, dining and entertainment bargains were taller and more
prominent than the casinos themselves. These days, the tourists fly
in, with their accommodation prebooked, and the Strip itself is too
clogged with traffic for aimless cruising to be a pleasure. The
twin aims of the latest generation of giant casinos have become to
keep their own guests on the premises for as much time as possible,
and to lure in the pedestrian sightseers who throng the sidewalks
outside. Pure spectacle is the name of the game, be it the volcano
at the Mirage or the Sphinx at Luxor . Time was when
each casino was a standalone oasis; now they're crammed so tightly
together that they feed off each other - the Eiffel Tower at
Paris , for example, sells itself as the ideal place to
watch the fountain ballet at Bellagio across the street.
The northern end of the Strip is traditionally regarded as
being the intersection of Las Vegas Boulevard with Sahara Avenue,
although since 1996 the Stratosphere , a few blocks north,
has made a brave attempt to change public perceptions. Its southern
end, by contrast, is constantly shifting. The empty spaces south of
the most recent casino to appear here - the latest, but almost
certainly not the last, was Mandalay Bay - have always
presented the double advantage of offering plenty of room to build,
and also the closest location to both California and the airport.
Broadly speaking, therefore, in following the Strip from south to
north, this section also journeys back through the history of the
city.