Pillar 227 happens to be adjacent to the valet at the MGM Grand. Except for its number, 227 is indistinguishable from the other plain white pillars that hold up the Las Vegas Monorail tracks. They are not painted with advertisements for production shows or covered in posters for upcoming concerts or even plastered with flyers looking for lost pets or pointing you to nearby yard sales. Taggers haven't defaced them with graffiti. These barren pillars are among the most modest use of space in Las Vegas: They are without hype, promotions or messages of any sort. Obviously, very few people are expected to trek down here. Of course, in that calculation, the monorail is working, which it isn't.
Whatever the wonders presented on the Strip, gaming companies don't put near the same effort into the backside of a megaresort. Walking along the parking garages, side streets, paved lots and dirty construction sites that the monorail follows is like being stuck behind a rundown urban mall. Beneath the monorail are littered beer cans, leftover McDonalds containers and odd smells coming from dumpsters.
Sadly, the metal rods and insulated wires that make up the tracks don't provide much shade. The track also lacks the crossing ties that might provide shade under a traditional train track. Near the MGM, the monorail is high enough to remind me of a roller coaster. Closer to the Hilton you can almost leap up and touch it.
Near the pillars behind the Polo Towers are signs that some marketers have anticipated a few pedestrians. There are news boxes along the sidewalk with cards; a typical one promises a "Shy Temptress" direct to your room as a $45 special. You won't find out about offers like that riding the monorail.
Since the Aladdin chose not to be a part of the system, there is no station there. But that didn't stop the casino from trying to reach the monorail's passengers as they glide by on the tracks that the Aladdin refused to help pay for. Dangling from the Aladdin's parking garage is an advertising banner: Anheuser World Select Lager Beer, Ten Brewmasters, Four Continents, One Beer. The banner would be prominently visible only to someone sitting at the window of, say, a passing monorail car.
There is an excellent view from pillar 190 of one of the trains—black and sleek with its advertising logo for the Monster Energy drink—as it sits unmoving at the Bally's and Paris station. On the sidewalk beneath the station there are two wooden benches, each carefully shaded by trees. They are not meant for the monorail passengers, though; the benches face away from the monorail, meaning that you can't see either the station or the train from them. But these benches do provide sightseers a prime opportunity to sit in comfort, watching the cars come and go from the Paris parking garage.
How surprising, then, that on this recent hot afternoon, on a crowded Vegas weekend, just a block behind one of the busiest pedestrian streets in the world, not a single person is using the benches back here. Their loss, because instead of being amongst the teeming masses trying to catch a glimpse of tawdry pirate chicks and dancing water jets, I sat on the wooden bench and saw both a Ford Escort and a Ford Taurus exiting the parking lot! I had plenty of elbowroom the entire time.
The monorail pillars are hard for a pedestrian to follow as they travel above closed-off spaces and weave into stations. The tracks also are set above some of the parking lots behind casinos like this one at Harrah's; that's where the tire landed that fell off the monorail earlier this month. I keep my eyes skyward just in case. Everything that has fallen from the monorail so far has happened while the train was moving. But who is to say it is safe now? With the monorail's—excuse the pun—track record, I wish I had a hard hat with me.
Though it wasn't noticed at the time, the week in July that the Las Vegas Monorail launched happened also to mark the anniversary of the U.S. space station Skylab's 1979 plunge to Earth, which scattered dangerous debris across the Indian Ocean and into Western Australia. Besides the habit of raining parts upon the streets of Vegas, the monorail has other similarities with Skylab. Both were expensive. Skylab obviously cost more, $3 billion, but, though the monorail cost less than a third of that, it only had to travel four miles. Of course, trying to do what's never been done has risks, and as Skylab was the first U.S. space station, according to its website the Las Vegas monorail is "the most technologically advanced public transportation system of its kind in the world." Maybe instead of being so advanced, it would have been better to nick Disneyland's monorail, which has been going strong for generations.
Only once do the pillars leave public streets or casinos and travel through a parking lot clearly marked "No Trespassing." Interestingly, the parking lot at 3700 Howard Hughes belongs to the building that houses the offices of Las Vegas Monorail Systems. I trespass across their parking lot to Paradise where the pillars are once again easy to follow.
The pillars around the Hilton have a comfortable walkway beside them, and the trees directly under the tracks are so tall in places that they almost touch the track. FYI: Column 32 is missing a chunk of plaster.
The final stop of the monorail is at the Sahara. There, the track splits.
These pillars lead down Sahara before leaving the road and heading into a large docking station called the Operation Maintenance Service Facility. Given that there are, at the moment, no operations to maintain, it seems some kind of irony is at work.
Lucky pillar 13 juts out at the corner of Sahara and Paradise, an optimistic first step for an expansion that is for now—like the monorail itself—on hold.