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Las Vegas Weather
Las Vegas is at the heart of the hottest, harshest desert in North
America, and so receives less than four inches of rain (10cm) per
year. Temperatures, however, vary enormously, with daytime maximums
averaging over 100°F (38°C) in July and August, and night-time
minimums dropping below freezing in December and January. The
midsummer heat on the Strip is unbearable, making it impossible to
walk any distance during the day, so the ideal months to visit are
April, May, September and October. Hotel swimming pools tend to be
closed between October and March inclusive.
The city is at its quietest , and room rates are therefore lowest,
during the first few weeks of December and the last few weeks of
January, and also during June and July, while Christmas and New Year
are the busiest periods of all.
Las Vegas Overview
Shimmering from the desert haze of Nevada like a latter-day El
Dorado, Las Vegas is the most dynamic, spectacular city on earth. At
the start of the twentieth century, it didn't even exist; at the
start of the twenty-first, it's home to well over one million
people, with enough newcomers arriving to need a new school every
month.
Las Vegas is not like other cities. No city in history has so
explicitly valued the needs of visitors above those of its own
population. All its growth has been fueled by tourism, but the
tourists haven't spoiled the "real" city; there is no real city. Las
Vegas doesn't have fascinating little-known neighborhoods, and it's
not a place where visitors can go off the beaten track to have more
authentic experiences. Instead, the whole thing is completely
self-referential; the reason Las Vegas boasts the vast majority of
the world's largest hotels is that around thirty-seven million
tourists each year come to see the hotels themselves.
Each of these monsters is much more than a mere hotel, and more too
than the casino that invariably lies at its core. They're
extraordinary places, self-contained fantasylands of high camp and
genuine excitement that can stretch as much as a mile from end to
end. Each holds its own flamboyant permutation of showrooms and
swimming pools, luxurious guest quarters and restaurants, high-tech
rides and attractions.
The casinos want you to gamble, and they'll do almost anything to
lure you in; thus the huge moving walkways that pluck you from the
Strip sidewalk, almost against your will, and sweep you into places
like Caesars Palace . Once you're inside, on the other hand, the
last thing they want is for you to leave. Whatever you came in for,
you won't be able to do it without crisscrossing the casino floor
innumerable times; as for finding your way out, that can be
virtually impossible. The action keeps going day and night, and in
this windowless - and clock-free - environment you rapidly lose
track of which is which.
"Little emphasis is placed on the gambling clubs No cheap and easily
parodied slogans have been adopted to publicize Las Vegas, no
attempt has been made to introduce pseudo-romantic architectural
themes or to give artificial glamour or gaiety." WPA Guidebook to
Nevada, 1940
Las Vegas never dares to rest on its laurels, so the basic concept
of the Strip casino has been endlessly refined since the
Western-themed resorts and ranches of the 1940s. In the 1950s and
1960s, when most visitors arrived by car , the casinos presented
themselves as lush tropical oases at the end of the long desert
drive. Once air travel took over, Las Vegas opted for Disneyesque
fantasy, a process that started in the late 1960s with Caesars
Palace and culminated with Excalibur and Luxor in the early 1990s.
These days, after six decades of capitalism run riot, the Strip is
locked into a hyperactive craving for thrills and glamour.
First-time visitors tend to expect Las Vegas to be a repository of
kitsch , but the casino owners are far too canny to be sentimental
about the old days. Yes, there are a few Elvis impersonators around,
but what characterizes the city far more is its endless quest for
novelty . Long before they lose their sparkle, yesterday's
showpieces are blasted into rubble, to make way for ever more
extravagant replacements. The Disney model has now been discarded in
favor of more adult themes, and Las Vegas demands nothing less than
entire cities . Replicas of New York, Paris, Monte Carlo and Venice
now jostle for space on the Strip.
The customer is king in Las Vegas. What the visitor wants, the city
provides. If you come in search of the cheapest destination in
America, you'll enjoy paying rock-bottom rates for accommodation and
hunting out the best buffet bargains. If it's style and opulence
you're after, by contrast, you can dine in the finest restaurants,
shop in the most chic stores, and watch world-class entertainment;
it'll cost you, but not as much as it would anywhere else. The same
guidelines apply to gambling . The Strip giants cater to those who
want sophisticated high-roller heavens, where tuxedoed James Bond
look-a-likes toss insouciant bankrolls onto the roulette tables.
Others prefer their casinos to be sinful and seedy, inhabited by
hard-bitten heavy-smoking low-lifes; there is no shortage of that
type of joint either, especially downtown.
On the face of it, the city is supremely democratic. However you may
be dressed, however affluent or otherwise you may appear, you'll be
welcomed in its stores, restaurants, and above all its casinos. The
one thing you almost certainly won't get, however, is the last laugh
; all that seductive deference comes at a price. It would be nice to
imagine that perhaps half of your fellow visitors are skilful
gamblers, raking in the profits at the tables, while the other half
are losing, but the bottom line is that almost nobody's winning. In
the words of Steve Wynn, who built Bellagio and the Mirage , "The
only way to make money in a casino is to own one"; according to the
latest figures, 85 percent of visitors gamble, and they lose an
average of $665 each. On top of that, most swiftly come to see that
virtually any other activity works out cheaper than gambling, so end
up spending their money on all sorts of other things as well. What's
so clever about Las Vegas is that it makes absolutely certain that
you have such a good time that you don't mind losing a bit of money
along the way; that's why they don't even call it "gambling"
anymore, but "gaming."
Finally, while Las Vegas has certainly cleaned up its act since the
early days of Mob domination, there's little truth in the notion
that it's become a family destination. In fact, for kids, it's
doesn't begin to compare to somewhere like Orlando. Several casinos
have added theme parks or fun rides to fill those odd nongambling
moments, but only ten percent of visitors bring children, and the
crowds that cluster around the exploding volcanoes and pirate
battles along the Strip remain almost exclusively adult.
Neighborhoods and orientation
It doesn't take long to come to grips with the physical layout of
Las Vegas. Downtown , slightly southeast of the intersection of I-15
and US-95, may stand at the center of an urban sprawl that stretches
fifteen miles in all directions, but it's the legendary Strip ,
starting two miles south of downtown, where the main action takes
place. In fact, by no coincidence at all, the Strip begins at the
point where Las Vegas Boulevard leaves the city limits, and casino
owners are therefore not liable to city taxes.
The Strip itself consists of the four miles of Las Vegas Boulevard
between the Sahara and Mandalay Bay , and thus now reaches as far
south as McCarran Airport. Almost every building along the way is a
casino, each frantically clamoring for the attention of the tourists
who throng the road day and night. For the sake of convenience, it's
often loosely divided into the South Strip , from Mandalay Bay up to
the MGM Grand and New York-New York ; the Central Strip , which
includes Bellagio, Caesars Palace and the Venetian ; and the North
Strip , from the Stardust to the Sahara .
Whatever you might expect, downtown Las Vegas is not a bustling area
where locals go about their business far from the mayhem of the
Strip. Instead, it too is utterly dominated by casinos. Its
centerpiece, the Fremont Street Experience , is an extraordinary
architectural conceit, in which four blocks of its main thoroughfare
have been roofed over to give it the feel of a theme park rather
than a real city. An unfortunate side effect has been to make the
rest of downtown seem even more derelict and menacing than before;
it is not an area any visitor should attempt to explore.
In between the Strip and downtown lie two somewhat seedy miles of
gas stations, fast-food drive-ins, and wedding chapels, parts of
which have been optimistically but pointlessly promoted as the
Gateway District .
Being closely paralleled by both the I-15 interstate and the
(currently inactive) railroad line, the Strip also serves as the
dividing line between east and west Las Vegas. The closest attempt
to match the success of the Strip has been along Paradise Road ,
immediately to the east and home to the Las Vegas Hilton , the
Convention Center, the Hard Rock , and several popular restaurants.
A large campus to the east of Paradise Road, between Flamingo and
Tropicana avenues, houses UNLV - the University of Nevada Las Vegas
- whose students tend to hang out on Maryland Parkway , another
block east.
Although the area to the west of the Strip is less susceptible to
generalization, the Rio and the Palms have encouraged tourists to
stray across to the far side of the interstate, and Decatur
Boulevard , especially around Sahara Avenue, is a thriving shopping
district.
City residents, of course, can distinguish between the demographic
profiles of any number of Las Vegas neighborhoods , but tourists
spend so little of their time anywhere other than the Strip or
downtown that they can remain oblivious. Broadly speaking, the
northeast and northwest quadrants of the city are its less affluent
areas, while its most fashionable district is Henderson to the
southwest - ranked in its own right as one of America's
fastest-growing cities - with the new Summerlin development to the
east tipped as a future rival.
Entertainment
There was a time when performing in Las Vegas represented the
absolute pinnacle of any show-business career. In the early 1960s,
when Frank Sinatra's Rat Pack were shooting the original Ocean's 11
during the day then singing the night away at the Sands , the city
could claim to be the capital of the international entertainment
industry. It was even hip.
The money is still there in Las Vegas, as was shown by the MGM Grand
paying Barbra Streisand a reported $20 million to perform on
Millennium Eve, but the world has moved on. As the great names of
the past fade from view, few of the individual performers popular
with traditional Vegas visitors are now considered capable of
carrying an extended-run show. Today's stars, on the other hand -
Celine Dion excepted - don't want to spend their lives playing
Vegas. Top-selling musicians make quite enough money from recordings
and occasional tours not to need to spend months at a time in the
desert.
Nonetheless, live entertainment remains a crucial component of the
Las Vegas package, and the days of the big-budget "spectacular" are
far from over. The tendency nowadays is to rely on lavish stunts and
special effects rather than global megastars, with the
illusionist-magicians Siegfried and Roy now into their second decade
at the Mirage . A fair number of old-style Vegas revues are still
soldiering on, but there are more stimulating contemporary
productions than you might imagine. In particular, the arty
Canadian-based circus/theater troupe, Cirque du Soleil , has
revolutionized attitudes toward what Las Vegas audiences might be
able to handle. Its two stunning shows, Mystère at Treasure Island
and the magnificent O at Bellagio , remain the biggest tickets of
all, though the Luxor 's Blue Man Group has stolen a little of their
avante-garde thunder. To make sure of seeing one of these big-name
shows, especially on a weekend, it's essential to make reservations
as far in advance as possible; if you're happy just to see
whatever's available, however, most of the lesser shows are still
selling tickets right up until showtime.
It also looks as though Las Vegas might finally be getting more into
tune with the musical tastes of the baby-boom generation. You can
still see Tom Jones, Englebert Humperdinck, and Wayne Newton if
you're in town at the right time, and lots of unfashionable names
from the Seventies and Eighties linger on, but the Hard Rock,
Mandalay Bay , and Aladdin are all now showcasing the biggest names
in contemporary rock, reggae, blues, and soul.
We've reviewed a representative cross-section of Las Vegas shows.
All take place on the Strip ; several of the downtown and off-Strip
casinos have showrooms, but with the Rio repeatedly misfiring, none
currently features anything of interest. Note that the entertainment
scene was especially hard hit by the post-September 11 economic
downturn. Several shows closed, while others reduced their frequency
and/or ticket prices. All the listings here are therefore even more
subject to change than usual.
As for what the future may hold, the Cirque du Soleil will certainly
remain at the forefront. They're said to be developing a show for
Steve Wynn's Le Reve , set in a Himalayan village where all the
children aged under eleven can fly, and another for New York-New
York , with a fire theme to match O's water motif. The biggest
single project of all, however, is the Colosseum at Caesars Palace ,
intended to draw four thousand people per night to watch Celine Dion.
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