A recent worldwide vote determined the New Seven Wonders of the World, built by man. That list, determined by about 100 million Internet and telephone voters: the statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro, the Taj Mahal in India, the Great Wall of China, the Palace Tombs of Petra in Jordan, the ancient Inca mountain city of Machu Picchu in Peru, the Colosseum in Rome and the Mayan ruins in Chichen Itza in Mexico.
Here, we present Las Vegas’ Seven Wonders, as determined by the scientific analysis of seven—count them!—writers.
CITYCENTER
What’s most impressive about MGM’s CityCenter, at $7.4 billion the largest privately financed development in the country, is not its 18 square feet of built space. Nor is it the spectacular buildings by a gaggle of starchitects, including Cesar Pelli and Daniel Libeskind. Nor is it the fact that, due to an astonishingly liberal tax credit passed by the state legislature, the development may be the largest green building project in the world, a LEED-certified community. It’s not even that its largest hotel will be the tallest one in town. The most impressive aspect could almost be the audacity of attempting to design in one fell swoop an urban core for a city that by its very nature is resistant to having one. But other projects are also attempting something similar. And a factor at CityCenter that certainly gives one pause is that it will include a semipublic $60 million art collection.
But what truly lifts CityCenter above an increasingly crowded field of large projects in Las Vegas is that it’s being built just as, simultaneously, the housing market enters a death spiral downward and the costs of building materials, such as cement and steel and even copper wiring, climb steeply in the opposite direction. All great monuments make you suspend your disbelief about the limits of human ability. In this case, a collection of briskly selling real estate where the condos start at something north of $1,000 per square foot makes us accept Las Vegas Levitation as a law of nature. And that’s a wonder to behold as it’s constructed before our very eyes. –William L. Fox
Tiffany’s in White Cross Drugs
Cafés used to be drug-store staples, but nowadays no one would expect to be able to sit down and have a burger in their local Walgreens. So the mere presence of Tiffany’s Café (formerly known as the Liberty) in the venerable White Cross drug store is something of a wonder. The Downtown institution has been around for over 50 years, serving the same dependable diner fare (burgers, sandwiches, pancakes) to casino workers, taxi drivers, prostitutes and anyone else who frequents the area. With the ongoing artsification of Downtown, Tiffany’s has become a favorite post-party dining spot for inebriated hipsters and creative night owls.
What’s wonderful about the place is, of course, not just the food (although it’s always tasty and comforting). The atmosphere—from the drug store’s vintage façade to the endearingly awful paintings on the walls to the colorful characters you may run into in the parking lot—is like a time capsule of old Vegas, and the charm of sitting by the dingy perfume counter while chowing down on fries never gets old.
Also a time capsule is ageless cook Lou, who’s working seemingly at all hours of every day, and never fails to ask you, “The liquid or the powder?” if you order a Coke. That’s a wonder we hope will never cease. –Josh Bell
McCarran International Airport
Let us dispatch the unpleasantness first. McCarran International Airport is among the nation’s unloveliest—at least until, or unless, you get to airy, bright Terminal D. Its tangle of access roads confuses even longtime locals. Then you have questionable (to state it as neutrally as possible) real estate transactions. And the disruptive re-routing of Russell Road, once one of the least congested, swiftest-moving East-West thoroughfares in the Valley.
But McCarran is a marvel. The 10th-busiest airport in the world and fifth-busiest in North America, McCarran processes nearly 125,000 humans into and out of the Valley every day—straining them through those tape-line mazes with videos of second-tier entertainers blunting the edge of we’re-all-gonna-die security tasks; disgorging them into the Great Hall of show teasers, barking carousels and cell-phone assignations.
Economists will tell you the bed is the engine of Las Vegas, and that you cannot underestimate the importance of highways shuttling bettors and clubbers to the Strip. But McCarran is in many ways the hub of the Valley. There it is, right in the middle, more or less, its rumblings and picture-rattlings part of daily life for nearby residents, its ascents and descents yet another amusement for hotel guests. (And not a few locals ...)
More important, it is the local’s easy gateway to Anywhere. The number of local travelers is growing, not surprisingly. For high volume’s low airfares they endure outbound planeloads of boo-hooing losers and woo-hooing dudes on the way back. It’s a tradeoff not many cities offer. –Chuck Twardy
Hammargren’s yard
The glory and spectacle and splendor of Dr. Lonnie Hammargren’s backyard museum cannot be seen from outside, from walking or biking or driving by. No, no, no, no: Only the magnitude of the collection of state artifacts catches the eye from afar.
You gotta make a stop there at the most recognizable private home in town, just south of Flamingo and Sandhill Roads. You gotta get inside the Castillo del Sol. You gotta take a walk through the million-dollar stage props, the High-Roller rollercoaster, the signs from the defunct casinos (still luminescent after all these years), the space station and observatory and the rest of the old Lt. Governor’s myriad and miscellaneous stuff that sticks out from over the triplex’s backyard fences and rooftops. That’s when you’ll see the real marvel.
It’s all in the details. Over there is a toilet seat that belonged to Bugsy Siegel; there up all around is a series of photos of UNLV’s arena packed during a Runnin’ Rebels game in the glory days, placing you at center court of the Thomas & Mack; and there are candle-holders from the old Desert Inn Hotel, marble from the original Golden Nugget and nuggets from Yucca Mountain; and there’s a buffet sign that reads “All-you-can-eat $3.99”; and there running beneath your feet and through all the thousands and thousands of things are railroad tracks.
In there, the details, lies the grandeur. That’s where the decades of vision and sweat and superhuman obsession lacking which no miracle of authenticity can be performed manifests itself. The details.
And it’s not over yet. Who knows what the old doctor’s got in mind now that the Frontier has closed and the monorail is sliding toward its own end? –Joshua Longobardy
Elvis Statue at the Las Vegas Hilton
He’s a wonder, all right. Elvis is our Machu Picchu, our many-chambered sprawl of mythical ruins (shown here pre-devastation). Or is he our Christ the Redeemer, the giant Brazilian statue of Jesus that also made the new Seven Wonders of the World list? He is, after all, a popular nexus of worship (rock critic Lester Bangs: “We will never again agree on anything the way we agreed on Elvis”) with a life-after-death mojo second only to Jesus’. Or is he our Great Wall of China, broad and encircling, visible from space?
Well, sure, and you can throw in a comparison to the Roman Colosseum, if you want to (all that life-or-death battling going down inside), but none of that is what makes him a Las Vegas wonder. No, he’s on this list as the highest of rollers, a man who totally nailed that American Dream business—fame! fortune! a new him!—on a vaster scale than we can even dream of. Way to go, big guy! Only, like most of us—and you hear this about Megabucks winners, too—he just wasn’t ready for the whole big thing. His American Dream went sideways, all the fame and fortune he’d gathered up pickled into toxic excess, and he wound up sweating into his jumpsuit, pudgy and beside the point (I bet even Lester Bangs had stopped listening), however beloved he might’ve been. And when we think of that Elvis, we think of Vegas, not coincidentally where millions of people come for their shot at fame and fortune.
So he’s the great cautionary tale of the city. But this is Vegas, so this statue commemorates the good years, the winning years, when he was vital and exciting and at good fighting weight. No wonder. –Scott Dickensheets
Las Vegas Springs Preserve
The Springs Preserve, a 180-acre expanse on the site of the prehistoric springs that attracted and nourished Las Vegas’ native peoples, is a captivating hodgepodge of trails and gardens, desert animals and wetlands, natural history museum and eco lab, education and entertainment. The exhibits are a blast, and the LEED-certified architecture—full of thin vertical bands of concrete and weathered steel that give the buildings a rusty, ancient patina—is both cutting-edge and classy.
What’s more, as in all great public spaces, just walking around is a delight. At the entrance, a spiraling ramp takes you down out of the heat, and the rumble of cars, and the visual noise of modern-day Las Vegas, and winds you through canyon-like (faux) rock formations and bubbling creeks, and underneath tent-like shades. All this before you even buy your ticket.
It’s ironic that we’ve lost the preserve itself—it dried up in 1962—and all we have left is a $250 million commemoration to its existence, accessible by the very automobiles that are ruining our environment in the first place. (At least the parking lot is covered by an array of cool solar panels.) In other words, the center still uses the “it only looks real” playbook that made modern Vegas.
Yet the preserve pulls a near-miracle. It connects us to our past and our future while giving us a break from the banalities of the present day. It reminds us that though our city has blissfully disregarded its (albeit short) history, the story of the Valley itself is long and engrossing. That we don’t have to settle for the tired tits and blackjack clichés, or this month’s new construction starts, to justify our existence. It also points us to a future, where we do more with less, where we rediscover the unexpected delight of taking a walk in the desert on a hot summer day, where we create a city and a landscape that is worthy of our better natures. Forget the neon lights. This is the best show in town. –T.R. Witcher
Clark County Regional Justice Center
Screwy. And yet, perfect. Our halls of justice were delivered as faulty, late and over-budget in 2005 and, like so many new buildings here, beautiful.
But the Regional Justice Center is a world-class marvel for reasons beyond its architectural prowess. First off, consider that there even exists a building in which right and wrong are routinely determined in Las Vegas, land of murky morality. Scads of people—parties to civil and criminal cases—routinely, famously, receive something meted out as justice here in this building, in a city where cheating is literally our slogan, in addition to being our history and our ethos. In that vein, this building is also where Vegas lovebirds seek permission to marry, making this the site where irony intersects with justice and reckless judgment.
It wouldn’t have sufficed for the structure that shelters all of this to have been delivered affordably and on time, and so, it wasn’t. The $185 million building was four years overdue, and to the delight of many, came with construction disputes and flaws ranging from uneven floors to leaking walls. This is a full-fledged, maximum-degree wonder. The leaking walls of justice are akin to the bleeding eyes of a Virgin Mary—there’s something supernaturally breathtaking about buying a $185 million building—a $185 million anything—and seeing it leak. And it pains me to point out the leaky county coffers metaphor, but sometimes there is pain in wonder.
Even with the repairs made, and the chambers open, the Regional Justice Center’s design lasts, and reminds us—of course—that justice isn’t balanced. The 17-floor RJC is remarkable, it receives architectural praise—and it’s not straight. It’s asymmetrical. It’s a big building that’s decisively geometric; it’s visually clean, full of sharp crisscrossing lines, and then, somehow, its steady lines veer, exterior walls cut angles wider than 90 degrees—imbuing it with a slight sense of uncertainty, or defiance, or surrealism. Or wonder.
–Stacy J. Willis