The story of Las Vegas is one of survival, renewal, and the American spirit. In fact, in many ways, the story of Las Vegas is the most extreme version of America’s story. Luck becomes loss; industry becomes service; hope presages the inevitable crash. And yet, like the country in which it resides, it carries on, more powerful than before, growing from each setback to become increasingly resilient and consequential.

The story of Las Vegas is also, for your author, a personal one. That’s why, as I prepare to leave Las Vegas to return to my home of Washington, DC, I wanted to offer an atypically personal reflection on the Silver City in two parts. This is the first part, which explores how Las Vegas came to be; while the second part encapsulates what the city means and where it is going. Part love letter, part history, part tribute, and – inevitably – part autobiography. I hope you’ll indulge because there are so many things people overlook about this scorned, scorched, and sacreligious city in the Mojave. 

Now You See Me

What few people realize about the Las Vegas metropolitan area – which encompasses the eponymous city, Henderson, the city of North Las Vegas, a swath of master-planned communities, smaller towns, and the Strip – is that it is one of the greatest melting pots in America. Not just because of the sweltering heat, but because of its relatively short history, the diversity of its population, and how it has handled perpetual change.

Las Vegas contains large Latino, Asian, and Black populations while non-Hispanic whites represent only around 40% of the metro area’s population. Hawaiian natives have taken to calling the city the “ninth island” due to their large presence in the city. Despite its relative poverty compared to many cities in America, this disparate population has demonstrated remarkable resilience to a litany of economic headwinds over its history. Clark County, which is home to the metro area, constitutes around 74% of the entire population of the state, and thus dominates the cultural, political, and economic engines of Nevada. Thanks in part to the massive influx of people into Las Vegas over the last few decades, only 25% of Nevadans were born in Nevada itself, and it has long held the lowest share of native-borns compared to current residents of any state. Many American cities that boast similarly diverse populations and demographic growth disguise an extreme level of segregation, but of America’s 51 largest metropolitan areas, Las Vegas is the least segregated. 

This may be because Las Vegas is a young city, both by American and global standards. In a century it’s grown from a village of 2,000 people to one of the most consequential cities in the country. But its reputation incontrovertibly precedes it. Everyone seems to have an image of what the city is like and its purpose before they visit – but the best thing about that is it leaves them open to realizing, if they step a few blocks or miles away from the tourist destination they expect, they’re in one of the best places in the West. 

Yes, it’s a vacation city, thrilling to visit and enjoy the perks of hotel life and the sensation of opening the oven every time you open your door. But it’s also a window into a bygone era, a place as improbable in existence as it is unrelenting in its expansion, and a testament to the human tendency to persevere and find both beauty and opportunity in utter desolation. To understand that, and before I can tell you what brought me to Vegas, you need to understand how Las Vegas came to be.

Bright Light City

As you can imagine of a town built in one of the warmest deserts in the world, the existence of Las Vegas has never been easy. Every boom is followed by a bust. The town of Las Vegas was founded in 1905 where the railroads from up north down to California intersected. Gambling was outlawed in Nevada in 1910,  Prohibition took effect in 1918, and a series of railroad bankruptcies and strikes effectively killed the city through the mid-1920s. In 1931, construction began on what was then called the Boulder Dam (now the Hoover Dam), and a massive labor force of men poured into the Las Vegas Valley with an appetite for what you’d expect of men working in the sweltering heat all day: booze, gambling, and women – all of which remained commercially illegal. 

Conscious of losing out on profits to the mafia, the state legalized gambling, permitted prostitution, repealed prohibition, and paved Fremont Street. By the end of the 1930s, the completion of the Hoover Dam brought a massive source of electricity to the valley and the bright light city really came into its own. 

Then came the war. Two military bases, Creech and Nellis, sprung up in the area, and with them came both new customers and regulations. As the city tripled in population from 1940 to 1950, prostitution was banned, and gaming taxes were levied by the state. The mob’s role in the city’s industry grew and many of the town’s most memorable casinos and performers cropped up. The Stardust, Golden Nugget, Sahara, and Tropicana; Frank Sinatra, Liberace, Dean Martin, and Carol Channing. The federal government’s presence would continue to grow as atomic testing began in earnest upstate and what would come to be McCarran Airport opened up to commercial flights.

This free-wheeling era, blemished by the excesses of its talent and its criminal enterprise, met its natural opposition by the time Vegas entered the 1960s. A series of casino fires, major commercial openings (enter Caesars Palace), and the entrance of Howard Hughes as a major financier began to mark the city’s tipping point. Enterprise was in, the wild west was – at least on the surface – out. The Rat Pack’s party came to an end after their drinking, gambling, and personal indiscretions caught up with them. Hughes cut off Sinatra, the state legislature approved corporate-owned casinos, and desegregation led to white flight from the city’s center. 

By the 1970s, the city saw an opportunity to become bigger and better than a few tacky hotels in the desert. Hughes acquired and legitimized a number of mob-connected properties, but Anthony Spilotro and the Chicago mob launched a haphazard campaign (loosely depicted in the film Casino) in Vegas to skim casino winnings and assert a presence in what was an “open city” for the mafia. That big business and the mob smelled money in Vegas was inevitable but the true existential test would come as other states started to smell the money to be made too. The legalization of gambling in Atlantic City, New Jersey in 1976 created competition with the East Coast. Las Vegas offered star-studded spectacle shows with bigger names – B.B. King, Elvis Presley, Liberace, Lola Falana – but by the late 1970s, Vegas had become a satire of itself. It was an excess. It was America taken to its furthest extreme: fat, addictive, commercial, and unnecessary.

The Hangover

Elvis died from such excesses in 1977. Atlantic City proved a potent draw for thrifty travelers in the country’s population centers as oil prices soared and a recession caused consumption to collapse. The 1980s marked one of Las Vegas’ deepest lows. Only entertainers on life support came to frequent the city. Casinos laid off musicians and many of their supporting staff. A massive fire at the old MGM Grand Hotel killed almost 100 people in what remains the worst disaster in Nevada’s history. The Las Vegas Hilton fire killed eight. The PEPCON disaster killed two. But, in truth, it was a lack of new business interest for well over a decade that put the city itself on life support.

And that’s when Las Vegas discovered its future. In 1989, The Mirage, a Steve Wynn project financed by corporate interests, became the first new casino to open in the city in 16 years. It was nice, affordable, and exciting. There was a “volcano”, live tigers on exhibit, and a dolphin habitat! The popularity of this model lit a flame and the Strip exploded with massive casinos that doubled as comfortable-yet-affordable hotels with family-oriented entertainment, shopping, and restaurants. Over the course of the next decade, the Strip sprouted the pirate-themed Treasure Island, medieval-themed Excalibur, the Egyptian-themed Luxor, New York-New York (try and guess the theme), the opulent Bellagio, and the towering Stratosphere, ushering in the  era of the so-called “megaresort.” Many former casinos were imploded to make way for the new monoliths. The world’s largest hotel at the time, the MGM Grand, was opened in 1993. There was a rush to build and a population boom. 

The University of Nevada-Las Vegas men’s basketball team won the national title; the Las Vegas Motor Speedway opened; characters like Wayne Newton, Siegfried and Roy, and Mike Tyson would celebrate career-capping moments. When the 1990s ended, Las Vegas surpassed Mecca to become the most visited place on earth. By the time the city celebrated its centennial in 2005, it felt like nothing could stop it.

But as the 2000s wore on, the bacchanalia came to a whimper. The housing crisis and Great Recession hit Vegas like a brick. Development, housing starts, and construction stalled. As in any recession, the decline of leisure spending left the tourism-dependent city in dire straits. In a city where roughly a third of its workers were employed in tourism jobs that generally required little education and paid decent wages, unemployment shot up. This made the housing crisis particularly acute in the valley as subprime loans to these kinds of increasingly out-of-work laborers created an economic catastrophe, with 70% of Nevada’s homeowners in negative equity and property prices falling by nearly two-thirds. 

With so many bare lots, canceled projects, and empty development starts, the city would need to dig itself out of both a real and metaphorical hole. How it would do that, and where it would go in the next decade, is what brought me here today.