I have more things in my home than I actually need, but I still browse Retro Vegas, the vintage boutique on Main Street that caters to midcentury-modern artifacts — mostly as if I were at a museum (sorry, owners).

It's a fix I need now and then. A visit to a past that was exclusively about the future, a plunge into imaginary narratives of swank suburban postwar American life and the idea that better living was achieved through Good Design and a flamboyant good riddance to yesterday.

Hello, future. Hello, plastics. Hello, middle-class American opportunity, suburbs, car culture, biomorphic shapes and the Space Age. African aesthetic was influencing art. Scandinavians were influencing design. Eames was king. Googie signs were towering above gas stations, restaurants and everything else. Gender roles and the nuclear family were ridiculously idealized in pop culture.

I love that mid-mod staples are being displayed in museums and gallery exhibits. The same Teflon-coated sauce pan at the neighbor's yard sale might be in a glass case under the track lighting in a quiet gallery in any city, prompting discussions flavored by design or nostalgia. As to buildings, we laud architectural heroes while preservationists fight to save their creations. The fight is hellish in Las Vegas, an ever-changing city that came into its own during the era's prime, but now plows over the past as it molds itself for its next incarnation.

That's what makes Mid-Century Modern Las Vegas, an exhibit at the Nevada State Museum, all the more precious. It shows what has and hasn't survived, largely through the photography of Jay Florian Mitchell.

Amid mostly black-and-white photos of Las Vegas homes, banks, businesses and government buildings, we see how stunning McCarran, with its thin-shell concrete dome, once was, and how exquisite was its interior. Ranchera Medical Center was a gorgeous example of stellar mid-mod: a two-story structure off Rancho and Sahara with a cantilevered, decorative concrete screen, original globe-lighted interiors, raised tile fountains and indoor/outdoor characteristics.

Mitchell, a photographer who worked in New York in the late 1930s and '40s, then moved to Las Vegas, shot nearly every inch of this town in the 1950s, '60s and '70s. His family donated part of the collection after he died. Historian Dennis McBride was amazed by their value when he joined the museum as curator of collections and history and was eager to show them.

Mixed in are contemporary photographs, including an early '60s mid-mod home in Paradise Palms that is owned by Mary Margaret Stratton, who heads the Atomic Age Alliance and helped create a self-guided tour that includes homes built by famed modern architects Dan Palmer and William Krisel.

An entire section is devoted to Mason Manor in the McNeil Estates, where there is one block of homes virtually unchanged since 1964, when a newspaper real-estate ad touted a "talking house" that would answer all your questions.

McBride rounds out the exhibit with some of his own vintage products still being used in his home — Scandinavian modern pewter candleholders, centerpiece bowls, nested bowls, a 1950s casserole dish and cradle, decorative compotes, ashtrays, cookbooks and other dishware from the area. We learn tidbits about Pyrex and Corning and Tidbits and Russel Wright. McBride hopes the show will ground people in the era. It's a pocket exhibit in an out-of-the way museum, but definitely worth your while.