WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS ...
Russ Peters discovers there are plenty of sure bets to be found in the Entertainment Capital of the World.
Let’s start with the lights.
Sure, Paris might be the official City of Light, but if ever there were a town defined by sheer wattage it has to be Las Vegas, reputed to be the brightest city on the planet when seen from space, particularly against the darkness of the surrounding desert plain at night.
While both the Strip and Fremont Street are veritable supernovae in terms of emitted photons per square inch, we opt to ease into things with a visit to the Neon Museum, also known, fondly, as the Neon Boneyard.
The last wash of daylight fades over the eternal sawtooth silhouette of the Red Rock Mountains on the western horizon, as our tour guide leads us through a winding canyon of historic Las Vegas signage that practically echoes with the voices of Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, the click of poker chips and the chatter of the ivory pill against the numbered frets of the roulette wheel.
Artfully jumbled, up close the signs are — at once — somehow bigger than expected and smaller, casting a long shadow against the 20th century’s zeitgeist.
In the twilight, the signs, some decrepit and forlorn and others restored to their former glory, seem to grow out of the desert soil like an overgrown electric garden, a fever dream of neon and a symbol of the city itself — beautiful, gaudy, commercial, shimmering.
The Stardust, The Sahara, The Silver Slipper, The Golden Nugget — icons burned into our collective cultural consciousness — compete with lesser-known examples of the sign-makers’ art like light-up emblems for gas stations, trailer courts and wedding chapels.
We retreat to the venerable El Cortez Hotel and Casino, a bastion of the old Las Vegas and a fitting home base for our exploration of the city’s brief but rich history. Once owned by fabled Mafiosi Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky, the El Cortez, the eastern anchor of the downtown’s proto-Strip on Fremont Street — the birthplace of the city’s gambling scene — has witnessed nearly 80 years of Vegas hijinks.
It’s in a jumping and diverse neighbourhood, rougher around the edges than the engineered experience of the Strip, and revitalized in recent years after decades of decline.
The next day, we start our exploration on foot. An army marches on its stomach and we doubletime it to the nearby Donut Bar, where we fuel up on coffee and consider our breakfast options. I briefly eye the Poppa Tart, a sweet one-pound ode to the humble Pop Tart, before wisely opting for the marginally lighter Homer’s Donut — from the Simpsons, not the Odyssey.
Riding the sugar high, we make our way to the National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement, located a few blocks away in the city ’s old post office and courthouse. I know what you’re thinking: “This is Las Vegas, Baby! And you’re hitting a museum? In a post office? Snooze.”
Wrong. The Mob Museum — as it’s known on the street — provides visitors with an interactive, highoctane overview of the remarkable history of organized crime in North America, from its humble origins to the heights of its influence in the mid-20th century — notably in mobbed-up, freewheeling Vegas itself. Visitors witness the progress of the decades-long cat-and-mouse game between law enforcement and the Mob, including a multimedia highlight reel in the very courtroom where U.S. Senator Estes Kefauver held one of the nationally televised senate committee hearings into organized crime that would shine a light on the Mafia and make it a household name. The stakes were so high, and the security so tight, that the judge’s bench in the courtroom was reinforced with threecentimetre-thick steel plates (still in place) to protect the senators in the event of gunplay.
We emerge from our journey through America’s criminal underbelly far too early to start thinking about the nightlife. So we seek food and explore the rich trove of world-class street art and murals, colourful offspring of the Life is Beautiful music festival that commandeers 18 blocks on the eastern edge of the downtown core each fall, part of the area’s remarkable renaissance and resurgence.
Then we walk the length of the Fremont Street Experience, a fiveblock, pedestrian mall under the curved vault of the world’s largest video screen and flanked by Las Vegas’s classic casinos, including the Golden Gate, a historic hotel and gaming house, founded in 1905. Periodic screams are heard overhead as thrill seekers ride the zip line 11 storeys up.
I’ve zip-lined before and enjoyed the singular experience of zooming above a grizzly bear catching salmon in an Alaska stream, but I like the science-fiction vibe this hyper-mediated urban zip line offers, and we agree to return later to giveitatry.
Before that, though, we’ve got stuff to do, starting with a jaunt to the city’s original free-standing bar, Atomic Liquors. Just east of downtown, Atomic is a slice of quintessential 1950s Americana.
It hearkens back to a simpler time, when patrons would naively gather on the roof of the bar to watch fireworks on the horizon, specifically the mushroom clouds boiling up into the stratosphere from the atomic bomb tests at the Nevada Proving Grounds 100 kilometres to the north (hence the bar’s name and the pair of vintage Geiger counters flanking the premium liquors behind the bar).
Atomic Liquors has seen its fair share of high-roller action over the years, including frequent visits by the Rat Pack, Clint Eastwood and Barbra Streisand, who dropped by often enough to warrant her own bar stool, the only one in the place with a back.
But it definitely wasn’t all high rollers. I’m compelled to order a Hunter’s Smash, a drink based on bar regular Hunter S. Thompson’s favourite tipple, Old Crow bourbon.
As delightful as the Atomic is, we have business elsewhere — specifically, down on the Strip where we have tickets for the show Absinthe.
Staged in a pavilion on the forecourt of Caesars Palace, Absinthe — in keeping with its namesake, the wormwood-infused liquor with a centuries-old reputation for causing dark visions — comes across as a very good very bad dream.
It’s breathtaking in every way, from the skill of the virtuoso performers who use every inch of the minuscule stage at the centre of the tent, to the obscene, tabooobliterating MC who heaps relentless comic abuse on the poor souls in the front row.
And woe betide you if you arrive late. Just to be clear, Absinthe is
not a show for the whole family, but a decidedly adult, hallucinatory burlesque/circus/vaudeville act. We love it.
After the show, back downtown, we harness up for the Slotzilla Zoomline and in short order we are sailing over the heads of the Saturday night throng below.
This stretch of Fremont Street is plenty vivid enough from ground level at a walking pace.
As anticipated, soaring through what amounts to a half-kilometre-long tunnel of light and sound at nearly 60 km/ h is like being inside a video game.
It’s late and has been a long day, but time doesn’t hold much sway in this town.
It’s an artificial construct to convince you to go to bed.
Forget that. This is Vegas. We could wait until tomorrow for more fun, but it’s tomorrow already. Why stop now?
So we return to the warm, historic embrace of the Atomic for another drink, admiring the eternal neon glow the city casts into the night sky.