Bugsy Siegel’s original Flamingo is still there . . . sort of (same name, same site, but the orginal building is long gone).
Fuck that shit! Which casinos have historical associations with Hunter S. Thompson?!
Almost Swiftian in its rapier-like subtlety.
For the Rat Pack era, it was . . .
here’s an excerpt from The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition.
They say that Antarctica is the worst place on earth, but I believe that distinction belongs to Las Vegas, hands down. For one thing, Antarctica is more pleasing to look at. The natural scenery is about equal to Nevada’s in desolate grandeur, but Antarctica’s man-made artifacts are less distressing to an average human being’s neural network. The population of Antarctica, though tiny in comparison, is better-educated, less transient, and employed in more honorable work. Las Vegas certainly leads in cheap buffets, but the result is a shocking rate of obesity with attendent medical disorders. Some might even argue that overall Antarctica has better weather. In Las Vegas, a baby left unattended in the back seat of a car for nine minutes will fricasee before its mother returns with the dry cleaning.
As I write, Las Vegas is the fastest-growing city in the United States. For a culture that understands things only in terms of numbers, this supposedly proves that it must be a splendid place. I’ve heard it touted often as the American city of the future, the prototype habitat for a society in which the old boundaries between work, leisure, entertainment, information, production, service, and acquisition dissolve, and a new exciting, colorful, pleasure-laden human meta-existence finds material expression in any wishful form the imagination might conjure out of an ever-mutating blend of history, fantasy, electrosilicon alchemy and unfettered desire. If Las Vegas truly is our city of the future, then we might as well all cut our own throats tomorrow. I certainly felt like cutting mine after only a few days there, so overwhelming was the sheer anomie provoked by every particular of its design and operation. As a city it’s a futureless catastrophe. As a tourist trap, it’s a meta-joke. As a theosophical matter, it presents proof that we are a wicked people who deserve to be punished. In the historical context, it is the place where America’s spirit crawled off to die.
The trouble with Las Vegas is not just that it is ridiculous and dysfunctional, but that anybody might take it seriously as a model for human ecology on anything but the most extreme provisional terms. That they do might in itself be proof that American civic culture has reached a terminal stage. Even the casual observer can see that Las Vegas is approaching its tipping point as a viable urban system, particularly in the matter of scale. In evolutionary biology, at the threshold of extinction organisms often attain gigantic size and a narrow specialty of operation that leaves them very little room to adapt when their environment changes even slightly. This is the predicament of Las Vegas. Its components have attained a physical enormity that will leave them vulnurable to political, economic, and social changes that are bearing down upon us with all the inexorable force of history.
Las Vegas evolved as a crude extrapolation of several elements of American culture: the defiance of nature, abnormally cheap land, vast empty space for expansion, and the belief that it is possible to get something for nothing -- these elements all presenting themselves there in the most extreme form. The trouble with extrapolation as a growth model is that it assumes the continuation of all present conditions in the future, only more so. Since this is not consistent with how the world works, systems organized on this basis fail. Anyway, to extrapolate urban growth based only on extreme conditions invites certain catastrophe, since the law of unintended consequences will produce ever more compounded skewed outcomes. The destiny of Las Vegas, therefore, would seem bright in the same sense that a thermonuclear explosion is bright. I view it as a model for the extinction of the system I call the National Automobile Slum.
silenus
February 3, 2010, 11:47pm
46
That would be The Mint , downtown, which is now a part of Binion’s .
He was staying at The Mint during the events in Fear and Loathing. The Mint was sold in the late 80s to its next-door-neighbor casino, Binion’s Horseshoe, and The Mint became part of the Horseshoe. In the book, Thompson mentions he stayed in room 1850, but I assume the room numbers would have changed when this happened, so I’m not sure the current room 1850 in the hotel is the same 1850 it was when Thompson stayed there.
In any case, late last year, The Horseshoe shut down the hotel part of their business, so you wouldn’t be able to visit it anyway. The casino is still open, though.
The Venetian is far and away my favorite as far as the niceness of the rooms. The standard rooms are quite well appointed, unlike the Bellagio, Luxor and New York, which are little more than airport Hiltons when you’re just talking about the rooms.
Wheelz
February 4, 2010, 8:36pm
49
Wow, what a load of smug, self-satisfied, holier-than-thou crap that excerpt is!
Apropos of nothing, here’s an excerpt from The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition. by James Howard Kunstler: