Sunday, May 15, 2005
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal
JOHN L. SMITH: Las Vegas' future hinges on restoring downtown's past
"Welcome to the boomtown.
"Pick a habit.
"We got plenty to go around."
-- David & David
I'm downtown channeling the ghosts of Fremont Street on the cusp of the centennial when out staggers the Life Guard.
He's not in a saving mood as he walks about 50 feet from where, on a scorching day in the middle of May 1905, Las Vegas' founders auctioned the first town lots. He wears a bright red Life Guard jacket, but he's not even looking for the water.
He can't even save his own life. For him, Las Vegas is a mirage.
Like others of his standing, he's hustling a handout from the tourists in their shorts and fanny packs. He even hits up the guy who mops the street in the name of keeping the Fremont Street Experience clean. Now there's a job for Sisyphus.
Meanwhile, I'm thinking of Benny Binion and the other men who made vast fortunes on Fremont Street. I'm wondering, is this what you had in mind?
Did you intend, in the name of casino promotion and profit, to let downtown slip from a bustling city center with shops and supermarkets into a low-rollers' stroll and panhandlers' paradise?
Because that's what it's become. While development has stretched to the valley's farthest edges, the place where it all began suffers from an embarrassing decay. It's hard to imagine it was intentional, but the fact is the men who could have changed its course years ago chose instead to invest their profits elsewhere.
Like the Comstock barons of 140 years ago, they worked the downtown mine until it was nearly played out.
These days, Mayor Oscar Goodman and other city officials and citizens work every day to salvage downtown. They call it redevelopment, but it's really plain old development. It says something disturbing that the most progress to date has been made not in the heart of the old Las Vegas, but on the long-fallow desert nearby.
They're gaining ground. One day they'll celebrate their successes. But they'll spend decades attempting to save downtown from its double status as a home to bargain-hungry tourists and a meeting place for winos, druggies, crazies and scufflers of every stripe. It's no Atlantic City Boardwalk, but it's a shadow of the place that was once the center of nongaming commerce in Southern Nevada.
As I watch the street, it occurs to me that maybe I'm the rube. Perhaps a hustler's paradise is what the founders intended from the start when they set aside Block 16 for whores and card games, then in 1931 threw open the doors with legalized gambling. Souls were sold on the cheap. Las Vegas political leaders have largely catered to the gamblers ever since.
Speculators and angle-shooters have been a part of the Las Vegas story since the beginning. It was Los Angeles real estate investors who bought many of those first lots, bidding the prices beyond the reach of the calloused locals. It was the railroad that controlled the water and the politics then.
The players have changed over the years, but too often in Las Vegas the political game still treats the locals like carnival rubes. Note the number of city councilmen and county commissioners caught hustling in recent criminal investigations. Boomtown rats, every one.
Boomtowns are exciting places to work, but they're brutal on families. Even as it reaches its centennial, Las Vegas still is promoted as America's last great boomtown. And it's true.
But that's our challenge for the future: not just to grow, but to build a place that isn't littered with hapless alcoholics and bankrupt slot junkies, a place that provides a quality of life for working families, one that even acknowledges that our gambling culture comes with a price.
It sounds like a fantasy, but it's a day for dreaming.
I am reminded that on a slow day, a Fremont Street souvenir maven would glue a silver dollar to the sidewalk in front of his store and laugh for hours as he watched the suckers stoop to pick up the coin.
If we ever are to reclaim our souls, downtown must become more than a place where an endless parade of rubes reach for recalcitrant coins.
John L. Smith's column appears Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. E-mail him at Smith@reviewjournal.com or call 383-0295.
