This week's Time Magazine

[jairzinho]

Cover story:

[BillLe]

can I getta what what!!

All about vegas

[kitty7467]

I'm right there with ya! I absolutely love Vegas!

[edlosangeles]

The Strip Is Back!

By JOEL STEIN

TIME Magazine

July 18, 2004

My stomach hurts. It's 7 a.m., and somehow person after person after person has persuaded me to pull an all-nighter so they can show me their little slice of Vegas—their glossy strip club, their late-night pool-cabana scene, their Studio 54, their swank ultralounge. And now, at an after-hours nightclub, the bass pumping, my eyes jolted open every few seconds by the shock of manufactured cleavage, they are offering me a beer. Not even a light beer. All I wanted was to see a nice Cirque du Soleil show, work my expense account at Le Cirque with my only famous friend, Robert Goulet, and crash at the new hotel at Mandalay Bay, where my standard room has two bathrooms and three flat-screen TVs. But New Vegas won't let me be. It needs to show me what a great time it's having, with its supersized, sanitized, non-intimidating version of the same sins I don't want when I'm at home. I am deeply considering taking the beer so I can finally get sick and get the nurse to send me home.

This New Vegas, this stomach-churning Vegas, was built from a scrap heap of roller coasters. When gambling popped up at every racetrack and lottery counter and on every riverboat and square foot where a Native American once lived, Las Vegas had an identity crisis. It built theme parks, believing that if its vices had become acceptable, it might as well be a peddler of family-friendly activities. And it stumbled. Because what Vegas hadn't understood is that, compared with even the most worn-out vices, like keno and showgirls, roller coasters bite. So now Vegas has reinvented itself again, returning to vice but sanitizing it by creating the biggest, nicest place to sin ever imagined, a Sodom and Gomorrah without the guilt. People come to Vegas not to do what they can't do at home but to do it bigger and brassier. The town's logo, "What happens here, stays here," is complete camp. What happens in Vegas, in fact, is bragged about at home for months afterward.

All this feels strange, but not nearly as strange as talking to Robert Goulet about it, especially on three hours of sleep. "You beggar, it's not Sin City," he says. "It's Fun City." He has a point. It's a Vegas where the average tourist gambles only four hours in his four-day stay. That's fine with the casinos, since today they make more on rooms, drinks, food, shopping and entertainment—the stuff they used to give away to get you to gamble.

Vegas doesn't have to give anything away right now. It's so hot, even the people who own the town are spending money here. Last month, 87-year-old multibillionaire Kirk Kerkorian cut a deal to merge his MGM Mirage with Mandalay Resort Group to form the world's largest gaming company—until last week, when Harrah's Entertainment agreed to buy Caesars Entertainment in a $9.25 billion deal (including cash, stock and debt) that would create an even bigger company. Sheldon Adelson, the 70-year-old owner of the Venetian, is contemplating an IPO to score some cash to make a bigger bet on a new Strip hotel, the Palazzo, and other properties in the U.S. and overseas. In April, Steve Wynn, 62, the man who brought renewed glamour to Vegas in the 1990s with the shimmering-sided Mirage and then the Continental swank of the Bellagio, will open the $2.6 billion Wynn Las Vegas. It's just a construction site, but Wynn's creation is scaring all his competitors, with its plans for a 15-story mountain and lake, 2,700 suites-only rooms, a Ferrari and Maserati dealership, in-house staging of the Tony-winning Avenue Q and the only 18-hole golf course on the Strip.

In an economic experiment worthy of study at Harvard Business School, sex has proved to be far more profitable than wholesome fun. The MGM Grand tore down its amusement park and now houses two nightclubs (a third is opening soon) and a replica of Paris' Crazy Horse, La Femme, in which the dancers' costumes consist of a stringless G-string, one of many great new technologies to come from Las Vegas. At the Mandalay Bay, the House of Blues' new lounge has a Friday party for swingers. The hotel has a pool called the Moorea Beach Club where European-style bathing is encouraged. Some dealers at the Rio wear thong bikinis at night, and the Hard Rock has blackjack in the pool. The newest Cirque du Soleil show at New York-New York Hotel & Casino, called Zumanity, is a virtually naked gymnastics event in which men make out and the rest of the cast simulates acrobatic sex. "I had the vision of some couple seeing one of the acts and suing us after trying to replicate it and hurting his back," says Michael Bolingbroke, senior vice president of Cirque du Soleil. Treasure Island, trying to shed its wholesome image, now calls itself TI and has replaced its kid-friendly outdoor pirate show with one in which half-naked sirens say things like "Ahoy? Who you calling a hoy?"

The sexification has helped put Vegas on pace for a record year in visitors, after having 35.5 million last year. In the second quarter, revenue per available room in top hotels along the Strip rose to $190 a day, according to Joseph Greff of Fulcrum Global Partners. Room rates are up 40% from the same period last year, but the increase didn't stop occupancy from zooming to 95%. The city's casinos, hotels, restaurants, shops and clubs took in a record $32.8 billion in 2003. Vegas is the fastest-growing major U.S. city; 7,000 people move to Clark County each month, bulging the population to 1.6 million and overstretching the police, fire fighters, hospitals and schools. The unemployment rate is more than a third below the national average, and there's more construction than in any other city in the U.S. It's the country's top tourist and convention spot, with Vegas taking in more money from conventions ($6.5 billion) than gambling ($6.1 billion).

By granting outposts to chefs such as Emeril Lagasse, Thomas Keller, Alain Ducasse, Charlie Palmer, Wolfgang Puck and Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Vegas dining has become so high-end it employs more master sommeliers than any other U.S. city. The hotels only get more and more extravagant and opulent. One of the must-have features is a posh spa: every Strip hotel has one, such as the 69,000-sq.-ft. Canyon Ranch SpaClub at the Venetian, which has a two-story rock-climbing wall. Luxury designer shops, from Louis Vuitton and Gucci to Armani and Dior, are so common that they seem practically like Gaps in Vegas. Just down the Strip from the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum, which is inside the Venetian, the Bellagio houses another impressive gallery, which showcases works from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. There is even a push to move the Montreal Expos to town. Real estate companies are racing to Manhattanize the place by building high-rise condos in the middle of vast, cheap desert.

A good chunk of this growth is driven by people under 30, the ones who can spend money until at least 7 a.m., apparently with no significant stomach problems. Peter Morton, 56, the first to see that youth was an untapped market, in 1995 built the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in the middle of the sagebrush off the Strip. "It was totally intuitive," he says. That demo is funding the Richard Meier–designed tower he's building later this year. "Our demographics studies have shown that young people who come to Vegas are better educated, have more disposable income and are less averse to travel than the typical Vegas customer. Our dealers earn more in tips than any other dealers in Vegas." The hotel has a Sunday daytime pool party called Rehab, a Mexican restaurant called the Pink Taco and live webcams at the pool for its website. (What happens in Vegas goes right up on the Internet—the way everyone likes it.) The penthouse contains the giant Boom-Boom Room, which has a bowling alley, sauna and—like seemingly every party bus, large hotel suite and open flat space in town—a stripper pole. Las Vegas is on orange alert as far as emergency stripping preparation is concerned.

The Hard Rock's Saturday night comedy show, Beacher's Madhouse, is less about jokes than celebrity spotting, audience flashing, contortionists, midgets, monkeys and Jackass-style stunts. "People come to Vegas to release," says Jeffrey Beacher, a comedian who went unnoticed in New York City and now headlines a show it's impossible to get tickets to.

Following Morton's lead, the owners of Palms Casino Resort, which opened at the end of 2001, decided to aim even younger. The Maloof brothers, who own the Sacramento Kings basketball team, sold their local casino and built the Palms off-Strip and gave it no particular theme, figuring Vegas visitors would find out which hotel fit their demographic. (Wynn will also be unthemed, as will the Palazzo. The MGM Grand and the Mandalay Bay have almost entirely shed their film and Asian themes.) "I wanted to build the ultimate party place," says George Maloof, 40, the brother who runs the hotel. "I wanted to make sure I cultivated young Hollywood. In the '70s, '80s and most of the '90s, Hollywood didn't really come to Las Vegas except for a big fight. Now it's every weekend."

The problem with being a full-time host, Maloof has discovered, is that you have to be approachable. As teams of strippers practice water volleyball for the upcoming $10,000 tournament, women in mermaid tails splash in a tank behind him and go-go dancers cut loose inside a giant clear balloon at the poolside bar, Maloof is approached by a parade of personalities: a guy who wants him to invest in a pizza restaurant; a middle-aged Arab who wants to be reimbursed for part of the $10,000 he just lost in blackjack; a singer who wants Maloof to hear his act; a scary-looking guy who needs to borrow $500 for 24 hours. Not only does the guy not pay him back the next day but he also pops up on Fox's The Casino the following week. His name is Ernie, and he got kicked out of the Golden Nugget after convincing a young blond to work with him entertaining a high roller. Everybody in Vegas, Maloof explains, is looking out for only themselves. "You can't have a real relationship here," he says. "Not just romantically," he says. "The only people I trust are my brothers."

Maloof made the Palms—whose casino floor is full of the older locals who played in his previous hotel—into a hipster draw by housing the 2002 MTV's The Real World inside a suite in the hotel, a risky move the rest of Vegas thought was suicide (having cameras inside a hotel was believed to be like asking the gaming commission to shut you down). But the Real World scheme worked better than expected. It made the hotel and its steak house, nightclubs and tattoo parlor the hottest spots for the barely legal. It is Britney Spears' home away from home whenever she's in town to get married. "I have friends of friends who are 17 years old, and they can't wait to go to Vegas," says Maloof. "The trust-fund babies will do anything they can do to go to our clubs."

Copyright © 2004 Time Warner, Inc. All Rights Reserved

[fineones]

FUCK I LOVE THAT PLACE