Download The Real Las Vegas: Life Beyond the Strip by David Littlejohn PDF

By David Littlejohn

What photos spring to mind in case you reflect on Las Vegas? Mobsters and showgirls, magicians and tigers, multimillion-dollar poker video games and prizefights; towering signboards that remove darkness from the evening in entrance of ever extra wonderful on line casino lodges. yet genuine humans stay right here, too--over 1000000 this day, million the next day. higher Las Vegas has lengthy been the quickest becoming metropolitan sector in the United States. And virtually each element of its voters' lives is motivated by means of the almighty strength of the playing undefined. A group of fifteen journalists led by way of David Littlejohn, including prize successful photo-journalist Eric Gran, studied the "real" Las Vegas--the urban past the Strip and Downtown--for the higher a part of a yr. They talked to childrens (whose suicide and dropout charges frighten parents), senior voters (many of whom spend their days taking part in bingo and the slots), Mexican immigrants (who construct the hot homes and fresh the hotels), homeless humans and offended blacks, in addition to neighborhood police, lively Christians, urban officers, and prostitutes. They appeared into the neighborhood church buildings, the robust hard work unions, pawn retailers, the genuine property growth, defiant ranchers to the north, and dire predictions that town is set to expire of water. Proud Las Vegans declare that theirs is simply a pleasant southwestern boomtown--"the best group i've got ever lived in," says Bishop Daniel Walsh, who comes from San Francisco. yet their photo of Las Vegas as a colourful, civic-minded city conflicts with proof of transiency, rootlessness, political impotence, and social disorder. during this close-up research of the true lives being led in America's such a lot tourist-jammed, gambling-driven urban, readers will find a Las Vegas very assorted from the single they might have visible or imagined.

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Extra info for The Real Las Vegas: Life Beyond the Strip

Sample text

That’s what triggered it. ’s. They didn’t take us in, but we were told to call ahead the next time we wanted to play. “But you didn’t have to go outside of Las Vegas to know what was going on. Every Friday afternoon along Fremont Street, Metro would stop homeless people. , you went to jail. You were held Friday night through Sunday to avoid the weekend tourist crowd. ” That was then. Now, the city has translated its overt hostility into a tightly controlled containment policy. The homeless bounce between agencies within a limited geographic area far from the Strip and Glitter Gulch.

It is not. If not precisely a company town, Las Vegas still very much a one–industry town, not all that different from Detroit or Pittsburgh in their heyday. As the industry goes, so goes Las Vegas. It seemed arrogant at the time, but Steve Wynn was right to mock the pretensions of “economic diversification” represented by the opening of the Levi Strauss distribution center in 1996, of which the Development Authority seemed inordinately proud. “You would have thought the Hoover Dam was being built again,” he said.

This is basically a very blue-collar town, which could be positive or negative, depending on your perspective. It is a little more blue-collar than I would like to see. Finally, a number of these middle-class, churchgoing Las Vegans expressed a disgust at the “low moral tone” set by the gambling industry— as if its existence came as a great surprise to them after they chose to move here. For those with no interest in gaming it is necessary to ignore—or actively, mentally oppose—the messages of the fast-buck culture.

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