mike davis - Libcom

2 HAL ROTHMAN & MIKE DAVIS
1920s, Boulder Dam construction stimulated a new boom, and gamblers
and bookmakers expelled from Tijuana and Los Angeles in the late
1930s planted the seeds of the modern casino resort. World War II
brought defense industries, a huge airbase, myriad GI paychecks, and a
new highway to LA, a lifeline to the outside world. The Cold War added
the Nuclear Test Site and the mushroom cloud that was once the city’s
eerie official emblem.
Cowboys and mobsters, bankers and corrupt trade unionists watered
this postwar garden and harvested its sweet, and sometimes bitter, fruit
during the so-called golden age of the 1950s and 1960s. The reclusive
Howard Hughes, never seen by the Nevada public, transformed Las
Vegas again in the 1960s, which ended with a series of dramatic buyouts
and consolidations. Hotel chains, headed by Hilton, followed, preparing
the way for the corporate revolution that took shape during the
1980s.
As family or mob-owned casinos were transformed into giant gaming
corporations and merged with hotel chains and entertainment monopolies,
the pace of change dramatically accelerated. Two generations of
resort development were compressed into a single decade. Typical Strip
locations metamorphosed from overgrown motels into gambling theme
parks with Disneyland-like rides, upscale shopping, and world-class
spectacles and illusions. People even began to bring their kids.
The 1997 opening of Showcase on the Strip signaled yet another new
dawn for the fastest-growing metropolis in North America. Topped by
an enormous Coca-Cola bottle out of a Warhol reverie, the Showcase is
an entertainment superplex, with United Artists theaters, SKG Gameworks,
the All-Star Café, and Surge Rock, a faux climbing rock named
after Coke’s latest sibling. The brainchild of two young entrepreneurs,
Barry Fieldman and Robert Unger, Showcase is a perfect melding of
entertainment and shopping, a new concept already oft repeated, targeted
like a cruise missile at the under-thirty market. With the most
potent symbol of global capitalism, the Coca-Cola bottle, now crowning
the Strip, Las Vegas can claim its rightful place among the great growth
engines of the postmodern economy.
Since 1998, the Strip can also boast of offering the public not only
Mike Tyson and Wayne Newton but Picasso and Renoir. The upscale
counterweight to the youthful populism of Showcase is Mirage Resorts’
newly opened Bellagio, where $285 million of impressionist and modern
art graces the property, making it a strange hybrid of the old-fashioned
slot palace and the Louvre. Steve Wynn, then Mirage’s chairman and