What I Learned in Vegas, Part I

The first in an occasional series of observations made during and after my first trip to Sin City.


There is nothing in southern Nevada but Las Vegas.

This is an extraordinarily difficult concept for those who've never gone to Vegas to understand. Particularly those who, like me, live near a major city and are used to the notion of what a metropolitan downtown should look like.

Las Vegas's dirty little secret is that, besides The Strip, there is nothing around. This is not an exaggeration. Upon flying into the Valley, if you able to look out the windows on both sides of the plane, you will spy sand and distant mountains on one side, while huge casino-hotels with mountains in the background are on the other side.

The example of New York City is instructive here. When one flies into Newark-Liberty, to the left is the most famous skyline in the world, and to the right is...well...Newark.

But the thing about the New York skyline is that the entire island of Manhattan is filled with enormous buildings, punctuated here and there with larger structures (such as, say, the Empire State Building). And Newark, while grody as hell, represents some semblance of what one might consider at the tail end of some crazy asshole's definition of civilization.

The skyline of Vegas, on the other hand, almost exclusively consists of one street. And sure, the Palms, the Rio, and the Trump Tower are just a few examples of buildings that aren't literally on The Strip, but when you get outside a few blocks radius of Las Vegas Boulevard, you find long flat stretches of single story businesses and houses, as if the suburbs are the city.

It's a lot like an old-school frontier town from early wild-west movies. Except that, instead of a general store, saloon, barber, and other such quaint businesses, you have enormous fucking bright shiny hotels. And then...nothing.

Whether nothing is better than Newark remains to be seen.