Please please please like us and don’t go, really!
When someone cool moves to town, something gross happens to me: I sort of devolve into this puppyishly eager-to-please bowl of ambassadorial tapioca. I tell Cool New Person, “Let’s have drinks soon — there are some cool people I want you to meet!” I tell Cool New Person, “Hey! Before you get too busy, be sure to check out (amenity, site or destination that exemplifies the best of Las Vegas (typically Mystic Falls), and, more importantly, serves as a potent distraction from the stuff that’s perhaps not-so-best of Las Vegas)! It’s amazing!” I tell Cool New Person, “This can be a, uh, tricky place to settle into, so if you need anything — advice or intel or background or just a friend of whatever — call me!” (I even do that awful thing where you mime a phone with your pinkie and thumb and jangle-wag it next to your head.) I basically become this anxiously ass-kissing concierge laying down pre-emptively ingratiating cover fire. It’s the curse of a native Las Vegan who’s simultaneously proud of, invested in, and insecure about his hometown: a chronic reflexive posture of Please like me! It’s a reflex I’ve developed from having watched our neon revolving door churn like a propeller for most of my life, whether the people passing through were childhood friends, teen BFFs or adult colleagues.
Vegas takes time to figure out. Our homegrown arts and culture is easily outshined by the marquees on the Strip. Our basic socioarchitectural building block is the strip mall. “Fresh food” is, for most people, a Big Bite from 7-Eleven. Urban vibrancy is a warning letter from the HOA, and community is a cursory wave to your neighbor as you arrive home, your minivan ingested into the mouth of the garage.
At least it can seem that way at first. It takes a little more hustle here to find art, make friends, connect with a real community and learn that not all of us spend Friday nights connected to a video poker machine by a trembling necklace of drool.
I used to feel like a sycophantic mope, the way I’d fall over myself to be the city’s ambassador, envoy, apologist, explainer, whatever. But then I think about the friends I’ve made, and how just maybe they stuck around due in some molecular part to my flopping oafish enthusiasm, and I consider the trait anew as a pay-it-forward lottery ticket: What if these friends did the same thing to another fresh, confusedly blinking arrival? What if you did the same thing? What if we all did? Perhaps the better Vegas we’re all trying to cobble together would be cobbled that much faster.
Andrew Kiraly
Everything you want: the casino as Main Street
If you’re new to them, megaresorts can be confusing — labyrinthine; oddly placeless despite the relentless branding; crowded with restaurants, bars and gaming zones; resounding with crescendos of noise and flashing lights. The point of all this is to impart a mild vertigo of pleasant disorientation conducive to being shorn. Which can be great fun — if you’re a tourist.
But you’re one of us now, a resident, and you’re gonna need a different framework through which to understand and utilize casinos. Here’s one: Treat casinos like small-town main streets. A place for mildly aspirational window shopping at stores you don’t encounter often, where you might splurge on a small extravagance, then have a nice meal, hit a bar, watch the game, see a movie. All in one convenient location, thanks to the long trend of resorts offering every enticement to come and stay. Like the Main Street of our imaginations, it’s not where the mundane, pick-up-some-groceries aspects of your life take place, but neither is it where your inhibitions drop so thoroughly you drain your bank account to make it rain. It’s a slightly more special place for date nights, buddy time, family outings (look, an arcade!) or simple people-watching.
Thinking about a casino this way will help you filter out the racket and visual bombast, the constant entreaties to gamble, realigning the whole place into a roster of useful and amiable lifestyle amenities. Take it from us, that’s the best way to approach it.
Scott Dickensheets
I’ll be honest: Las Vegas may not be for you
In the past 20 years, a million-plus dreamers have moved to Las Vegas, attracted by good weather and low taxes, and often spurred by the media’s pre-recession promise of Las Vegas as a modern-day Detroit, where anyone with a work ethic can land a decent job and raise a family. Another handful has come recently, drawn by Tony Hsieh’s dream of manifesting a tech-friendly hub in Downtown. Plus, tourism numbers have broke records, exceeding 40 million annually. Everybody, it seems, wants some Vegas.
Results for residents have been mixed, particularly since the recession. For all those who have tried to make a go of living here, others have left, disillusioned by what they see as a city of broken promises. Some can’t or won’t leave, instead remaining and adding to an all-too-often tiresome dialogue about Las Vegas and its shortcomings.
Part of that has to do with the people Las Vegas breeds and attracts. Risk-takers often take credit when they win but place blame when they lose, and Las Vegas has a lot of losers. Then there’s the churn itself. With so many coming and going, it’s hard for newcomers to get a grip on what Las Vegas truly is and plug in with longtime locals. Still, once you put in the time, you’ll find that Las Vegans are (mostly) a friendly, egalitarian bunch.
But it’s hard to be friendly when so many arrive to take advantage of Las Vegas while resenting that it isn’t like the place they left. Of course it isn’t; that’s why you left! Trying to get Vegas to mimic how things were done elsewhere is a recipe for frustration.
The overarching issue is population. Thanks to a population explosion followed by a recession, the city often struggles to meet people's high expectations. Our schools and roads buckle under the pressure. You can’t double a city’s population in a decade and not expect these things to happen. Plus, all the clichéd complaints? They tend to hold true. Vice is everywhere. The city isn’t all that pretty. We have a homeless problem. It’s hot, dry and windy.
Las Vegas is an adolescent and proudly independent city, looking neither east nor west for guidance. When you understand that Las Vegas is really just a small town with a big tourist population, it begins to make sense. We’ve been playing above our pay grade for decades, and while it doesn’t always work out, at least we do it our way. Get on board or get out of the way! James P. Reza