Hope you’ll forgive me for making this personal. In May 1996, Greenspun Media Group purchased the publication that would later become the Las Vegas Weekly—the cultural biweekly Scope. In the process, it roused me from behind the counter of a Record City store, where I took CD trade-ins and wrote Scope articles on the sly. As a result of the time and effort I’d already put into the publication, I had the strange feeling about the Weekly when it launched on July 15, 1998—a sense of been there, done that. My focus had shifted to Greenspun’s other publications—the Las Vegas Sun, mostly—and my Weekly appearances became less and less frequent.

I’ve long regretted that. In fact, I even tried to jump from the Sun back to the Weekly in 2001, but it didn’t take. Shortly after I vanished from the Weekly’s masthead, the city’s cultural scene began to blow up, and the Weekly often reported from the center of the blast. I even continued to read it after I moved to Seattle in 2002, keeping current on a city in which I no longer lived. It was like watching my favorite team enter a season of consecutive wins.

Let’s back up. In 1998, what we think of as our current cultural scene was only partially recognizable. There was no Fremont East, no Arts District, no First Friday, Smith Center or Life Is Beautiful. There was a little bit of something happening by UNLV—a pair of coffeehouses, a few record stores, some local music venues—but even then, our university district was struggling to exist. There was a fairly robust assortment of places to see art—the Las Vegas Art Museum at Sahara West, the Nevada Institute for Contemporary Art, the Contemporary Arts Collective, galleries in the libraries, and later the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art—but then, as now, inducing locals to actually collect art was a challenge.

I don’t want to suggest that late-1990s Vegas was a cultural wasteland. In that time, I saw remarkable art by the likes of Kathleen Dillon Nathan, Anthony Bondi and others; I read my crappy coffeehouse poetry alongside such legitimate greats as Deborah Kohen and Penina Finger; I saw silent films accompanied by live orchestra at the Clark County Government Center amphitheater; I mixed with artists, educators and rebels at the Enigma Garden Cafe. But to my mind, what our cultural scene had in abundance in 1998 was a belief—still in evidence today—that anything is possible in this frontier town. If you want to mount an opera or build a stone colossus, you can, employing only the people and materials available right here. Unfortunately, what Vegas lacked in those days was the confidence that anyone would show up to see what you’d made.

I’d argue that the latter fear largely dissipated in the face of 21 years of population growth, character-building setbacks and outrageous cultural moonshots. The First Friday art walk began in 2002 as a simple walking map from the Arts Factory to the Funk House, and it soon cemented our Arts District in place around it. A footbridge in a Downtown plaza was engraved with words from local poets. Giant cultural festivals—CineVegas, the Jewish Film Festival, Vegoose, Electric Daisy Carnival, Neon Reverb, Life Is Beautiful, Believer Fest—began to manifest themselves, and many of them stuck. The Smith Center opened in 2012, re-orienting the city’s cultural compass. Independent theater companies formed and soon established individual identities. And fine art spilled across the Strip: modern works at the Cosmopolitan, Wynn and City Center, two separate Guggenheims inside the Venetian, two James Turrell installations hidden inside a mall.

Not all of it worked (pouring one out for those two Guggenheims). But this combination of local and national, private and corporate guesswork enabled Las Vegas to find a solid cultural footing that’s uniquely its own. All those years we were borrowing pieces from other cities—stage musicals, fancy restaurants and bars, Cirque du Soleil—we were laying down the framework that could support the Neon Museum, the Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute and the forthcoming Area 15. Local theaters and galleries tried and failed so that Mondays Dark and Preview Thursday could succeed. Every painted “zap box” drew the way for the outdoor sculpture that’s beginning to appear throughout the Valley.

At a certain point, you couldn’t ignore it anymore; the culture practically began pounding on our doors. It’s why I returned to Las Vegas from Seattle in 2012, and why I found my way back to the Weekly.

We don’t yet have all the pieces. We still need a permanent fine art museum, for example, and we don’t have enough “third places” to hang out in that aren’t bars. But aspiring to these things is no longer a hazy, faraway dream for our city. People can, and will, show up to see the culture we’re making—and to lay their own stones in the foundation for what comes next.