When I got into grad school in Las Vegas, I was living in France. I called up one of the program’s professors and asked him what it was really like living there. “You know in Europe, how they have those 1,000-year-old cathedrals with marble steps that have been worn concave and smooth by centuries of feet climbing them?” he asked. “You’re not gonna find any of that here. The oldest buildings are, like, 60 years old.” Vegas is little more than 100 years old, he explained, and regularly demolishes its limited material history without a second thought. The broader implication, I think, was that Vegas is not subject to the accumulated habits of a populace, but rather rises and falls at the whim of a few rich men.
Perhaps because of this disclaimer — or warning — I arrived on the lookout for signs of a city ground down from use. Vegas is for cars: The major roads are three lanes wide and neatly gridded, and coming from the bustling pedestrian streets of Europe, I found the city empty of people. Someone here and there at a bus stop, often seemingly ready to pass out from the heat, not climb the steps of a cathedral. No marble steps, maybe, but thousands of cars a day in 100-degree heat do make wheel ruts in the asphalt.
It wasn’t until an extended period without a car that I started to see the city on foot. Those wide roads and right angles worked well for wheels, but they sucked for walking. The crosswalks were dangerous, and the distance from the sidewalk to the parking lot to the strip mall store always made me feel out of scale, like I was in a land of giants.
Then I started to find “desire lines,” footpaths created not by design but by hundreds and hundreds of people taking the same shortcuts. Desire lines are most common in parks and woods, easy to spot as a trail of packed brown dirt cutting across a grassy field. In Vegas, they’re harder to see, lighter areas of tan through a gravel planter or packed sand. They’re often at busy intersections, offering the shortest path from the street corner to the parking lot, or linking bus stops with convenience stores — where everyday life thwarts the best-laid plans of planners and developers. They don’t announce themselves or sign their names in neon. With a heavy rain, a fair few could be washed away. Property owners rake them, too — some depicted here are already gone. But give it a month or three, and the people of Las Vegas will wear them back in.
