As the feds were cleaning out the last known mobster interests in Las Vegas, the corporate sanitization begun by Howard Hughes finally began to render the city's image, in a word, kosher. But the cleanup was not without its own costs: The transformation into a city run by a handful of large corporations is still lamented by many who feel Las Vegas has lost its soul.
The 1920s isolation, the 1930s innocence, the 1940s Wild West period, the 1950s wildcat decade, the 1960s saber-rattling, and the 1970s housecleaning all led to a 1980s retrenchment, whereby the primary focus, by far, zeroed in on the bottom line.
That bottom line, however, hit bottom in the 1970s and not the 1980s. The incipient days of legalized gambling in Atlantic City, along with the stagflation that followed the disastrous Nixon Administration (a similar economic situation, by the way, that faces us today), considerably reduced visitor volume and gambling revenues. A terrible fire at the MGM Grand (now Bally's) left 84 dead and 700 injured; the Grand closed from November 1980 to July 1981, putting a pall on the whole Strip. A fire at the Las Vegas Hilton in February 1981 took another eight lives.
But the recovery of the economy in the mid-1980s, along with the opening of the Mirage in 1989, triggered what has become Las Vegas' biggest boom yet.
Does anyone need to be reminded of how quickly and dramatically Las Vegas has changed over the past 19 years? If so, consider this one statistic: Of the largest 25 hotels in Las Vegas, only nine existed before the Mirage was built.
And hold onto your hats as that number shrinks dramatically with the arrival, in the next few years, of Encore, CityCenter, Cosmopolitan, Fontainebleau, Echelon Place, the Strip Plaza, and other planned yet unnamed megadevelopments along the Las Vegas Strip and beyond.
As we've seen over the past week, Las Vegas has had quite an illustrious and unstoppable 103-year recent history, but the biggest and the best are yet to come. And with luck, grace, and your support, we'll be here to chronicle Las Vegas' future history -- as it happens.
