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作者

Rex J. Rowley

来源

JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY,Vol.48,Issue1,P.

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英文

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作者单位

摘要

For tourist cities, image is everything. Las Vegas is no exception. But the image of this particular place has shifted in recent decades. As its population grew to fill an urban footprint extending across the Las Vegas Valley—far beyond the Strip—for much of the last two decades, the southern Nevada metropolis has been America’s Fastest Growing City, a title it held alongside more familiar monikers of Sin City or Entertainment Capital of the World. Such recognition has yielded queries by journalists, academics, and the general public about the city—and its residents—beyond the tourist corridor. In addition, numerous moments of national import have shone a non-gambling, non-touristic spotlight on the city. Several primary and general election presidential debates were held in Las Vegas between 2008 and 2020. Las Vegas has also played host to national sporting events and has secured two professional sports teams of its own: the National Hockey League’s Vegas Golden Knights and National Football League’s Las Vegas Raiders. And, the city has become a symbol of struggle and a beacon of resilience as it faced economic and emotional impacts in the aftermath of 9/11, in a long slog through a recovery from the Great Recession of 2008, in healing from the worst mass shooting on American soil at the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival in 2017, and in coping with the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 that brought a complete closure and slow reopening of the tourist infrastructure that fuels the city’s economy. Of course, the “Vegas” image of gambling, fun, and adult entertainment, so familiar the world over, has not disappeared. Even though larger numbers of Americans know someone who has lived in Las Vegas, when I tell people I grew up in the city, reactions still include strange facial expressions and queries such as “Wow, that must have been weird?” Those legitimizing sporting and political events held in the city are often portrayed in the media with gambling puns and with a visual backdrop of the famous casino-hotel skyline of Las Vegas Boulevard. Local professional teams also employ marketing that leverages the city’s widely understood imaginary as a gambling and tourist playground. And, the economy of the city, despite consistent calls for diversification, remains centered in and around the four-mile stretch of casino resorts known as the Strip, which, incidentally, is also the catalyst for both impacts of recent downturns and subsequent recoveries. So, despite a broadening understanding of Las Vegas as more than just a tourist town, it is still a place tied to its historical raison d’être. The picture that emerges of today’s Las Vegas, then, is of a city that remains a unique tourist place, but one with a changing persona. Recent scholarship on Las Vegas provides a glimpse into this shift. It is, of course, trite to speak of change in Las Vegas. As the authors of the five books reviewed here remind us, Las Vegas always has and always will change to feed the tourist/visitor hand that feeds it. Yet, these books—written from a diversity of perspectives across several disciplines—illuminate how the city is viewed by scholars and, through their work, how the city is perceived by outsiders and experienced by insiders amid such change in a way that signals something different than just a new trend on the Strip. Taken together, this body of scholarship reveals how the city is maturing—in both personality and purpose—into something that is a complex combination of both a tourist town and a typical American city. The image of Las Vegas, past and present, has most often been symbolized by its recognizable casino landscape. In The Strip, Stefan Al provides an analysis of how the built landscape of the city’s tourist centerpiece has changed over time and how such change reflects both the city itself and its place in America. This architectural history of the Las Vegas Strip is a visually stunning, richly illustrated book that serves as a contemporary companion to the oft-cited, pathbreaking Learning from Las Vegas.1 While intended for architects and urban designers, The Strip is written in an engaging manner that an interested lay reader will also find appealing. Al tells the story of seven architectural eras on the Las Vegas Strip. More significant than the story of architectural change over the years is how the author connects the themes in each era to broader trends in American culture of the time. For example, the “Pop City” era (late 1950s through the 1960s) of Las Vegas architecture was defined by the elaborate and extravagantly lit casino sign that had the simple goal of attracting the masses to play at gambling tables and slots; it was a moment in the city that reflected American ideals of “unfettered populism, unconstrained by elite notions of taste” (p. 107). Similarly, during the “Starchitecture period” (2001-present), Strip casino developers turned away from the imported themes of the “Sim City” era before it and toward “authentic architecture” and public art financed by collateral loans and real-estate speculation practices that propelled the city (and the country) toward financial crisis and the Great Recession that gripped the city in 2008. In Al’s analysis, Las Vegas in the Starchitecture era became less an exception and more a “metaphor for a troubled nation led into despair by an economy built on debt financing and increasingly high risk” (p. 217). Al constructs his story from a mix of primary (oral histories, magazines, and other firsthand accounts) and secondary sources. His descriptions of events and people are sometimes overexaggerated and ambiguous, and an occasional lack of (or misplaced) footnotes makes other claims feel unconvincing and unsubstantiated. Although Al follows a temporal progression from chapter to chapter, he skips back and forth over years within chapters, which could make it hard for some readers unfamiliar with Las Vegas history to follow a chronology. Still, Al’s most significant contribution is not his telling of the city’s history, but his interpretation of the look, feel, and meanings in Strip architecture. While Al’s explicit intention is to place the Strip and its changing face within the American context, he identifies the maturing place-based identity on the Strip that triggered similar changes in tastes and growth patterns off the Strip. As the Strip sought for mass appeal to larger and larger numbers of tourists, for example, the city population exploded as employment in tourism and other supporting industries attracted new residents. And, as I have seen in my own research, as the Strip began to mature in its architectural offerings, so too did the broader Las Vegas region begin to move beyond simple growth and residential living and toward community, quality of life, and a genuinely local sense of place.2 The city’s tourist core is also the focus of Larry Gragg’s Bright Light City. Specifically, Gragg’s work is a historical analysis of the perceptions of Las Vegas as seen through the lens of American popular media during the city’s first century, from 1905 to 2005. Gragg uses popular culture representations of Las Vegas to do what Al did with architecture: to tell the story of the place through a particular lens. He describes, analyzes, and interprets a huge catalog of films, TV shows, novels, nonfiction accounts, and newspaper and magazine articles to understand the images in popular culture that fuel an American attraction to this place. In some ways, Bright Light City is a retelling of the Vegas story, but from the perspective of how Americans saw the city from the outside. Gragg speaks to the imagery created about this place and how it has become such a cultural force in America. Gragg’s approach is thematic. In each chapter, he takes on a different predominant trope—as a gambling or mafia town, a place that objectifies women, a city of entertainment, or a city criticized by detractors—and then analyzes how the perceptions related to that trope have changed and evolved over time. He does so by mixing descriptions of magazine and newspaper journalist accounts of visits to the city aimed for a home audience, and thick descriptions of imagery and sound from films featuring the city, all scaffolded by traditional primary and secondary source historical documents. Gragg presents a rich and thorough, nontraditional historical account of how the city was seen by the country’s population. Gragg writes about the city as a seasoned historian. Although he spent much of his career writing about topics far away from Southern Nevada in both theme and location, he has made many personal trips to the city over the years, which led not only to a curiosity about the attraction of Las Vegas that is the topic of this book but also to a rich familiarity with the city. His richly footnoted examination of Las Vegas is thus one that illustrates a clear understanding of what makes this city tick and what specific narratives were influential in creating a sense of this place for those consuming popular media. As would be expected from a portrayal of this city through the lens of popular culture, most of Gragg’s work focuses on the Strip. But Gragg enriches this focus by placing the media images and perceptions of the city within a larger American context and historical moment, telling the story of Las Vegas as less isolated, however unique it might be, from a broader story. And, by openly acknowledging the various narratives that exist within popular culture, Gragg further cultivates a view of Las Vegas as a complex place with a changing personality over time, leaving different impressions on different people depending on the time and circumstances—whether in person or through media consumption—of when they meet the desert city. Jonathan Foster’s Stigma Cities also seeks to understand the perceptions of the Southern Nevada metropolis within a broader American frame. In this comparative history, Foster draws on social psychology literature about stigma and stereotype as applied to place and presents an analysis of the evolution of how three American cities—Birmingham, San Francisco, and Las Vegas—are seen by the public as places that exist “outside the perceived national norms” (p. 9). Like Gragg, Foster interprets national media (with heavy reliance on the New York Times) to analyze how American perceptions of each place have changed over time and how each place itself has changed as a result. I was struck by the approachable and natural way Foster integrates the stories of three cities I would never have put together in a single book. The underlying thread of changing places and changing perceptions over time becomes clearly apparent in Foster’s analysis of stigma. Indeed, Foster’s is a “history of place stigmatization” (p. 10). Cities spend millions of dollars and countless work hours trying to construct an image—intentionally devoid of historical circumstances that might be negative or stigmatizing—that is attractive to companies and residents. Foster’s work thus has broad applicability not only for urban scholars but also for urban planners, civic leaders, architects, and other practitioners in allied fields. Foster dedicates two chapters to each of the three cities. His analysis describes how Birmingham has found their stigma hard to shake since it was rooted in racism, which America is pushing away from, whereas San Francisco and Las Vegas have marketed with and built upon a broader mainstreaming and acceptability of ideals and practices around gay rights and gambling entertainment that America once shunned but is now gaining greater acceptance. The one-third of the book dedicated to Las Vegas tells of how the city once perceived as a pariah-like den of vice and hedonism has become more palatable for Americans. Foster notes changing American views of vice and the spread of American gambling as he analyzes several moments from recent history that signal how Las Vegas marketers have leaned into the place’s sinful reputation as a place apart, a place of escape, and a place where “what happens here, stays here.” Foster summarizes, “perhaps society has changed its view of just how deviant Las Vegas really is” (p. 190). Foster’s thesis hangs on the fact that perceptions of Las Vegas (and Birmingham and San Francisco) parallel changing American tastes. Thus, Foster goes a long way to show how an ever-changing Las Vegas sense of identity exists within the American story. More significant, however, is the fact that Foster’s telling includes the perspective of Las Vegas locals. Foster has a strong connection to Birmingham, where he grew up, and Las Vegas, where he went to graduate school, and it shows in his writing (particularly compared to San Francisco where he does not have as deep a personal connection). He thus writes with credibility about the local response to the mixed perceptions of both mainstream and deviant Las Vegas. Foster notes local unease (to put it mildly in the cases he describes) with the marketing of Vegas as an adult playground and explicit and revealing adult-entertainment advertising that is an unavoidable part of life in the city. Such a paradox encapsulates the ambivalent relationship Las Vegans have with the Strip, which I also have explored in a number of venues.3 The Strip provides jobs and a strong economy, but many locals find what it stands for morally questionable and “seek a more normal life than one associated with the perception of an adult playground” (p. 180). Stigma Cities contributes an important understanding of this maturing place by underscoring the local side of its story and its local sense of identity, but also how residents grapple with the intertwining, complex relationship between their city and the tourism juggernaut. Joanne L. Goodwin’s Changing the Game also explores this connection between locals and the tourist industry that runs the town. Goodwin’s book is an outgrowth of her work and leadership in the Women’s Research Institute of Nevada at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), and the Nevada Women’s Archive and Las Vegas Women Oral History Project, also at that university. Goodwin has written a volume that contributes to the growing scholarship on the place by historians at UNLV.4 At its core, her book is a depiction of a woman’s work world in Las Vegas in the half century following World War II. The majority of the text in Changing the Game is not Goodwin’s, but is an interpretive presentation of oral history interviews conducted with women who worked in the casino and entertainment industry. The book is organized largely by the geographic scope of each woman’s role within the casino-resort industry. Goodwin includes the stories of casino owners, casino and entertainment managers, dancers, “back-of-the-house” workers in housekeeping, uniform rooms, and union organizing, as well as office administrators and casino dealers. Employing oral history as both a source and a method, she notes, allows the narrators of these interviews to illuminate a particular moment and portray the ways such moments make meaning in their lives. Goodwin serves as a mediator and interpreter of those stories and meanings, placing them within a particular historical context. She does so through an introduction and a summary conclusion, interpretive interruptions in the script of each narrator, and well-placed and well-resourced footnotes. The result is a collaboration between narrator and historian that provides both context and meaning and helps “us look at something we’ve seen many times before and see it anew” (p. 182). Readers gain a new and revealing glimpse of Las Vegas in Changing the Game that fills in many of the details only briefly mentioned in traditional histories. Poignant examples include Lucille Bryant’s telling of the circumstances of life and racial tensions in 1940s and 1950s Tallulah, Louisiana, before she, and so many others, came from that part of the South to work in Las Vegas, and casino-owner Claudine Williams’s personal connections to well-known antics of Howard Hughes during his time in the city. Goodwin seeks to make visible the real lives of working women in Las Vegas, and the oral history approach is a raw and revealing way of doing so. Similar to other authors discussed in this essay, Goodwin argues persuasively through her introduction and commentary interruptions in each story how the individual and collective experience of women at work in Las Vegas fit into the American, postwar narrative. Whether in issues of the mob and crime, racial tensions, consumerism, and certainly changing attitudes about sexuality, “Las Vegas offers an excellent site to study changes in American culture” (p. 4) and how women in this city played a role in many such changes. Notwithstanding the fact that all of the women narrators in this book did their work in “the industry,” Changing the Game also reveals much about a local sense of place. As Goodwin notes, Las Vegas is a playground for others, but that playground is supported by workers. And, seeing the choices, motivations, and challenges of women workers who helped make this city allows readers to peer into the everyday lives of women residents. Goodwin relies on micro-stories that many Las Vegans will understand about how they came to a transient place of mostly newcomers, how they grapple with employment opportunities and struggles, how they faced racist or sexist barriers, and how they raise children in the desert metropolis. In short, Goodwin gives a reader a view of the locals’ Las Vegas. The search for the local comes into even greater focus in Michael Ian Borer’s Vegas Brews, though not without constant reference and deference to the tourist side of Las Vegas. Borer illuminates how we think about people, places, and the relationship between the two through an in-depth, ethnographic study of the Las Vegas craft beer scene. More specifically, Vegas Brews is a case study about cultural scenes: what they are, how they form, what meaning is created from them, and how they are similar and different from other cultural constructions, such as community. Borer provides broad and generalizable lessons about scenes and gives the reader a sense of the aesthetic nature of taste and the cultural meanings that surround one particular thing to be tasted. And, he does so in a quippy, energetic style that—despite seemingly endless stage, scene, acting, and alcohol puns and metaphors—keeps the readers’ interest. Borer’s personal observations as a participant member in this scene (including his thick descriptions of beers he experienced during the research), his interactions with the scene’s movers and shakers, and his interpretations of events, changes, and moments in its development in Las Vegas all give scholars a greater understanding of one part of this city’s cultural mosaic. As a geographer, I was impressed by such a focus on place and place attachment, but I also appreciated the scaled analysis that Borer presents. A local scene is certainly firmly rooted in local identity and culture. The Las Vegas craft beer scene, for example, includes local breweries that embrace gambling imagery (Bad Beat Brewing and Aces and Ales) and others that take on local toponyms and historical moments connected to Las Vegas (Tenaya Creek Brewing and Atomic Liquors). But a scene does not exist in local isolation. As the craft beer scene in Las Vegas formed, it grew stronger and more vibrant when it became “translocal” as other scenes recognize it. At another scalar level, the local and translocal scenes are further influenced and strengthened by the virtual scene that takes place online and through social media likes and shares (particularly on craft beer apps and Instagram) of craft beer experiences. Scenes also leverage local attributes to grow and to make stronger connections across scales. In Las Vegas, such attributes are indicative of local culture: a tourist town foundation facilitating festivals that bring together scene makers and consumers from here and abroad; the city’s location within the West in proximity to many strong local breweries and distribution routes; the community’s transience that has led to a thirst among a local population for more variety than what mainstream, corporate “Big Beer” has to offer; and a local desire to have something residents can call their own—that is not the Strip. Borer clearly situates Las Vegas within the context of the American story and the relatively recent rise of craft beer in this country, thus placing Vegas Brews in the company of the other books reviewed here, and, indeed, the broader canon of Las Vegas scholarship. Borer’s work, however, stands apart from that canon. Most studies of the desert metropolis focus on the Strip and might give an occasional or obligatory nod to normal life beyond the neon, but Vegas Brews begins and ends with local identity and culture. Indeed, the Vegas craft beer scene is indicative of patterns and processes that contribute to a local sense of place. It underscores the substance and culture beyond the Strip and that locals can “make claims about, and lay claim to, a part of their city that is often overshadowed by bright lights and drunken fights” (p. 21). Of course, this is still Las Vegas, so such a statement cannot be made without caveat: just as the local craft beer scene does not exist without a distinct identity tied, at least in part, to the “Vegas” imaginary (e.g., Ales and Aces), the local scene of everyday life for Las Vegans does not exist without a tie to the economy and influence of the tourist corridor. Each author of the five books reviewed here has a different target discipline (or subdiscipline) for which they provide important contributions—in architectural history, urban history, popular culture, oral history, and urban sociology. Larry Gragg was correct when he wrote that each story “of Las Vegas may be best understood as a reflection of the observer” (p. 236). But each writer also makes an important contribution to scholarship about one of the most well-known but least understood American cities. A clear thread running through each of these five books is an explicit effort by each author to stitch Las Vegas into the American quilt. Perhaps an underlying intent of authors—or at the least, a potential outcome of their effort—is a normalizing of what is a genuinely unique place. It is not just a tourist town, it might be said, but another American place. Although she referred to the oral histories presented in her book, Joanne Goodwin’s words apply to this suite of five books: “The Las Vegas that most of us think we know escapes its own mythmaking in these narratives” (p. 21). Another theme in these books, however, is that such an escape cannot be total. The everyday life of locals maintains a strong, longstanding, and often oppositional bond to what Goodwin refers to as the Las Vegas “master narrative,” what Foster sees as the “Vegas” reputation, and what Borer calls the “Las Vegas Syndrome” or “steep neon slope.” The Strip is the enormously powerful engine that built the architectural icons of the Strip as described by Al and the popular images seen and heard by Americans as analyzed by Gragg. It is what residents love to fight against in the search to find their own local sense of community and place-based identity, but it is also what makes their life in the city possible. Having my own roots in Las Vegas, and having grappled with issues of my own identity tied to this place in my research, it is not accidental that the three authors who most thoroughly wrestle with this dichotomy—explicitly in the case of Foster and Borer’s work or more implicitly in Goodwin’s—have done or still do call Las Vegas home and so have likely faced such issues of identity on a daily basis. In the nearly two decades since I began studying my hometown as an academic, I have often wondered about the life cycle of cities. As America’s youngest big city, Las Vegas may, in fact, provide a good laboratory to explore such questions. Borer muses on such thoughts: Las Vegas is a young city “compared to others across the American urban landscape, a fact that leads to the types of growing pains and identity struggles that more established urban areas have learned to deal with” (p. 1). Perhaps Las Vegas is coming into a mature stage of its urban life cycle. Supporting such a conclusion is a diverse set of strong and rigorous scholarly studies recently published about a city that has oft been a laugh and a byword among academics. And, whereas most scholarly work prior to the turn of the twenty-first century had the Strip at the center of their analysis, a more representative set of both local and tourist perspectives more completely fill out the Las Vegas story. These books provide a view inside Las Vegas and how it has matured as a city firmly emplaced within the broader American story. It is also a place where residents seek more earnestly for a local sense of identity and sense of community. Just as a strong sense of self is important for a person facing the struggles of life, building a sense of identity is of utmost importance as a city faces growing pains in the form of both triumphs and trials. Borer notes in his conclusion, for example, how the sense of community centered around the craft beer scene was a source of support for locals grieving after the shooting on October 11, 2017. The Vegas Golden Knights, in their widely successfully inaugural season that opened that same month, similarly provided a broader ranging rallying point and boost to local morale as the city mourned. Such togetherness will help the city and its residents to weather future struggles. Las Vegas has moved beyond its youthful frontier origins in the early 1900s American West, beyond its adolescent boomtown years after World War II as it looked for ways to draw Americans to its new gambling houses, and beyond its early adult years in the 1980s and 1990s when the city settled upon a firm foundation as a tourist town and the world’s gambling mecca. These publications reveal a Las Vegas in middle age, when the city has hit its stride, reliant on a tourist-based economy that supports 2 million people, but at the same time recognizing elements of its existence that may need to change to better support its people in the future.