As of Wednesday, August 30, Las Vegas, a city that has in part been made distinct by its issuances of marital permits in Saturday's and Sunday's (and holidays') wee morning hours, will discontinue its graveyard operation at the downtown marriage license bureau. From now on it will operate every day from 8 a.m. to midnight.
Which is still more hours of operation per day—16—than anywhere else in the nation, says County Clerk Shirley Parraguirre, whose office spearheaded the change after discovering that, without the graveyard shift at the marriage license bureau, at least $200,000 could be saved each year and applied to other, needy departments under her watch. Parraguirre says research shows that of the 122,259 licenses issued by the marriage bureau last year, only four percent—or about 4,890—were obtained during the graveyard shift.
The four girls who work the late-night hours at the downtown bureau say that no one will lose her job, or hours, but that the incomparable shift will be missed: the lines which would extend out the door at 1 a.m. on Saturday or snake down the block at seven o'clock on Sunday mornings, and the lovebirds who leave with chirps of rejuvenated optimism.
Las Vegas is the city in which Michael Jordan and Juanita Vanoy arrived without preamble and married at the Little White Chapel at 2:30 on a Saturday morning in 1989. Demi Moore and Bruce Willis wed here in the early morning hours in 1987. Britney Spears, of course, made news in January 2004 when she eloped with her childhood friend after an inspired Friday-night party leaked into Saturday morning, and hundreds of thousand of others, without celebrity status, have married in Las Vegas after the clock struck 12.
It's an unquestionable element of Las Vegas' culture, and it's the reason the change was covered by media outlets from California to New York, and even to metropolises as far as Asia (for Las Vegas is a destination for international party-goers). The news, say the girls at the marriage license bureau, was the means by which even they learned of the end of their graveyard shift two weeks ago.
Parraguirre says that the cultural implications of eliminating the graveyard shift were not discussed before the county commissioners voted in unanimity to pass the ordinance, simply because there was no real dialogue concerning the issue at all. She says that after she had conceived of the idea, she sent letters to every chapel in Las Vegas and only one replied. It did not offer resistance to the proposed change. Moreover, she says, a public forum was held to discuss the issue, and no one showed up. And so the commissioners listened to the county clerk's argument, based of course on economics, and passed it without reservation as the logical thing to do.
But last weekend the handbillers and limo drivers employed by some of Las Vegas' 24-hour chapels said that their opinion had never been sought, and that if it had been, they would have said "No way."
"Some weekends it gets thick out here, and our chapel alone will do 15, 20 weddings [they can be done in as little as 10 minutes]," said a limo driver who works for the chapel A Las Vegas Garden of Love, on Las Vegas Boulevard. "Also, I like it at night. There's no traffic or anything. It's just a straight shot to the chapel."
A handbiller for the Garden of Love said: "It's these chapels around [the bureau, on Third Street and Clark Avenue] that'll feel it the most, because people be comin' in from California at midnight, and they want to get the thing done quick. "And guys like me, too: I won't have this job."
If the general public was aware of the change, they didn't appear to be inspired to make one last race for graveyard marriages. The girls at the bureau say it was actually slower last weekend than usual, and the intermittent and diverse couples who did walk up the steps at the downtown bureau went undeterred by any type of lines.
"It's not like people can't still get married at 2 a.m.," says Paraguirre. "The 24-hour chapels will still be open. They just can't get the license. They'll have to get the license between 8 a.m. and midnight, and then if they want they can get married later.
"Anyway, my staff tells me that very, very few people actually get the license and then go through the ceremony in a spontaneous burst."
To tabulate the number of couples who do in fact submit to the love's instantaneous and irrevocable urge for union in the early morning hours of a weekend, or a holiday, demands one to go back and look at each license on a case-by-case basis, just as one would have to do to see how those marriages turned out.
In any case, Las Vegas has let perish another one of its defining characteristics; but true to the city's character, it did so without event.