This is what’s wrong: The Smith Center was built to last.
Wrong? Of course it’s not wrong, but it feels that way. It feels wrong because it is a welcome and tonic slap against the mentality we’ve all grown into as the side effect of being such a versatile and protean city: the mentality that everything here is ultimately disposable, destined for the bulldozer or to be passed along like a hand-me-down on its way to the landfill. For better or worse, we’ve built a city where stucco-and-frame homes are built to flip. A city where mini-malls host tenants that come and go as fast as tourists. A city where even the gleaming grandiosities (and, let’s admit it, a few monstrosities) of the Strip are ultimately stage sets to be violently dismantled when it’s time for a new act. Amid this story comes The Smith Center, feeling wrong because it is so right.
The Smith Center aims to be a lot of things: a cultural and artistic hub (see page 24), an architectural homage to our origins, a bold flare fired for the cause of urban renaissance. But more than all that, it’s a monument to the idea that a real city deserves strong and enduring institutions — and that a responsible and mature city builds to last.
Lest I wax too rhapsodic, I’ll point out some irony in all this. I chuckled when I stepped outside at the end of the tour — my eyes still drunk on all that Smith splendor — and saw the train of mottled Union Pacific rail cars sitting there like a rusty snake. The Smith Center lives next to the historic kernel of our city — of all things, a bustling stop on a rail line going elsewhere. Those scarred and flaking rail cars — tools for transit, tropes for the transitory — now give way to a monument to new possibilities. Let’s start listening.
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Several readers gave us a hearty finger-wagging over an item in our Best of the City edition, in which we talked about the best place to find arrowheads. Our language should have been more precise. But, for the record, we did not mean “find” as in to collect or take arrowheads. Not only is that illegal, but it’s just a completely jerky and selfish thing to do. I remain confident that Desert Companion readers know the difference between hands-off discovery and plundering. When appreciating the history, heritage and natural beauty of Southern Nevada (see page 43 to get started), ooh and aah to your heart’s content — but keep your hands on the camera.