Are we there yet?
Have we arrived at our stop on the Manifest Destiny Express? You know the stop, the one where we at long last check out our reflection in the evening windows and grin and wink and tell ourselves we're "world class." We've been primping so long, calling ourselves fabulous, unforgettable, one-of-a-kind, that we wouldn't really know what to do if we were suddenly faced with the need to believe the things we say. Where do you go from there? What do you do for an encore when you're 100 years old and in the best shape of your life?
You maintain the pose, that's what you do. You realize that your beauty—not Grace Kelly beauty, not even close, but the knowing, petulant beauty of an aging Marlene Dietrich—is founded on exuding confidence while never failing to doubt yourself deep down. Las Vegas will remain fabulous to the exact degree that it continues to think itself a fraud, and be bothered by the thought. Our inferiority complex—this nagging sense that, fabulous as we might be, we're not quite a real city—has its roots in the two central facts of our existence: First, we are a tourist town, and we've let ourselves be defined, as the gender studies folks say, by the gaze of the Other; second, we live in the desert, and the other man's grass really is greener. The old American dream of a town worth living in never hinted at the possibility of a pink pebble lot with basalt boulders and Saguaro.
Could it be we really are just a mirage—one with excellent job figures and runaway growth, mind you, but nevertheless an illusion of sunshine on pavement? Are we capable of carrying on—are we, in our relative prosperity, even interested in carrying on—the long, halting project of city-making? Is community really worth the trouble in a historically transient town? The hard questions, as hard questions will, have huge implications: Anxiety at the core of a town's civic spirit, not unlike anxiety in the pit of your stomach, can lead to tough, steady improvement or swift and simple disaster; you can identify what ails you, or you can just declare, To hell with it all, and row merrily downstream. And a town so assured of its unreality that it refuses to look honestly ahead is most certainly headed for the falls.
It has been a century since William Clark, a U.S. senator from Montana who is, safe to say, better remembered in Nevada, auctioned off 1,200 lots in what is now Downtown Las Vegas. The Valley was the right place, at the right time: The San Pedro, Los Angeles, & Salt Lake Railroad was on its way, Las Vegas was the best watering hole within 200 miles, and steam locomotives need water. From its start, then, our city was a place to stop on the way to somewhere else, a place to stock up for the road, just the sort of place where a crafty and mildly creative fellow can turn the wants and needs of tired travelers into a whole lot of money. It was also a place whose identity was crafted as much by the people who passed through as by the people who lived here. And with the passing decades, as we got better and better at separating visitors from their wages, we also developed a prodigious skill for filtering our self-image through the eyes of our carnival marks. The apotheosis of this civic personality disorder has come in the last decade, the decade since Swingers, when young men who grew up in this city began, like little bands of drunken sojourners from Van Nuys, to greet the coming of Friday night with cries of "Vegas, baby!" This is the decade that brought us wall-to-wall strip-club ads on sports-talk radio, big billboards at rodeo time requesting we "Get Ready to Buck All Night," and the invitation to the rest of the country to use our city as a moral dumping ground, because, after all, the shit stays here.
Frankly, it was all fun for a while. But the time has come to stop being a reality show and start being real. Clark County now has 1.8 million residents, most of them in the Las Vegas Valley. These residents have to work and study and pray and play and suffer and screw. In other words, we are real. And our reality is, as we speak, faced with the enormous economic, cultural, and environmental shift that has acquired the name "Manhattanization." It took from the 1960s to the 1990s for us to transform from a ranch town to a suburban one. Now, suddenly, in the sliver of days since the 2003 land boom, we are being told that our future is the high-rise, the town home or, failing that, life in Pahrump. The whole frightening, thrilling transformation offers an extraordinary opportunity to remake our city for the better. It also offers the opportunity to forfeit our future once and for all to those for whom this place is only a playground. There are those for whom Manhattanization means building tall buildings for Shaq and DiCaprio. But there are also those who believe that what makes Manhattan Manhattan is not Central Park West but Central Park. It can mean pricey high-rise clusters, gated just like suburbia itself. Or it can mean living on a human, rather than automotive, scale—a new approach in which moderate density offers not the nightmare of an urban slum (the fear that gave rise to suburbia in the first place), but an opportunity to connect with our city and our neighbors, to move about on foot, to walk from home to work to park to store and back, to ride light rail to more distant neighborhoods and disembark where we please, to watch a play, to hear a concert, to catch a ballgame and a beer without worrying about driving home. Our Manhattan can save our water and spare our land and leave our mountains in the shape in which time has sculpted them. In our Manhattan, the wealthy and the poor will cross paths even when lawns are not being mowed.
Thrilling and frightening. I have shared a wall. I have heard neighbors sneeze and cough and pleasure one another through long, theatrical nights. Never again do I want to share a wall. And my car, I like to park it. And my yard. I love my yard. I am a Las Vegan almost since birth. I am a backyard boy. I am raising my son a backyard boy. Those endless, utterly private hours of communion with the lawn—my Sabbath service, my Sunday school—how could I have done without them? Am I to accept that the next generation will play only on balconies and in public parks? Am I to accept that suburban single-family housing inside the Valley will be the abode of the wealthy? I am already being asked to accept it. We are all being asked. I want my rapid transit and my pedestrian-friendly new-urban town, but they are making it hard for me. Why does this city always seem on the verge of something either wonderful or awful, or wonderful and awful? Suburbanization itself I once viewed with the darkest of dread. When I see blasting near Red Rock, I still do.
Las Vegas may be turning 100, but in a very significant way, those who have been here even 10 years, even five, have been privileged to be present at the creation. These are the savage days in which a place is made into what it will be. The process is filthy with pebbles thrown from trucks, and windshields chipped, and ancient hillsides graded flat, and human security shaken and stirred into a knockout cocktail of anxiety and opportunity. These are the days we'll tell our grandkids about, the days in which we build their city, the days for which—in a spirit of gratitude or disgust—they will hold us responsible.
It's a pleasure to be here.