For those of you unfamiliar with it, VegasTodayandTomorrow was an encyclopedic resource of facts, figures, and photos of development in Sin City. It carried everything from construction updates to a map of which casinos served Coca-Cola and which served Pepsi (for more on this, see QoD Archives 7/25/07 and 1/9/09). One could easily wile away several hours studying Adams’ labor of love, which was compiled so that Vegas fans like himself had a one-stop shop for development news and imagery.
According to VegasTodayandTomorrow's home page, there also haven’t been any new pages since Aug. 25, 2012, although blog entries continued into mid-November. However, Adams has not gone completely quiet. He continues to Tweet, most recently on October 1, when Golden Gate owner Derek Stevens bought the former Clark County Courthouse.
Part of the problem, of course, is that during the Great Recession, there wasn’t anything of architectural consequence happening on the Strip or, indeed, throughout the valley, choking off Adams’ supply of new material. However, that doesn’t explain why he’s kept mum on construction at SLS Las Vegas or reporting Genting Group’s takeover of the former Echelon site.
Phone calls to Adams’ home yielded only a "no longer in service" message and an e-mail produced no reply; he seems to have set up a new blog earlier this year in his professional capacity as an architectural-design consultant, but there have been zero posts to date; hence, your guess, we regret, is as good as ours -- if anyone knows more, please drop us a line.
This is actually the second occasion on which we've addressed this same query. Mark Adams was noted as having gone AWOL back in September, 2009, prompting us to conduct a similar probe. That time around, we did successfully make contact with the owner of the VegasTodayandTomorrow website, which has been an invaluable resource to us on several occasions over the years.
When we spoke with him then, he informed us that he'd recently suffered no less than five kidney stones in six weeks, among other crises, includinng a death in the family that coincided with him house-hunting -- an apocalyptic combination of some of the most stressful situations known to man. This unhappy confluence accounted for the hiatus to which the previous inquirer referred, although when we reached Mr. Adams, he reported that he was feeling better than he had in months and that updates would be forthcoming in the near future. They were, until the latest silence; we just hope that no news is good news.
While his focus is more specifically on the business aspects (as opposed to the literal bricks and mortar and aesthetics) of the gaming industry -- spreading out in ever-increasing circles, from Las Vegas to a macro vision of the global picture -- our own Stiffs & Georges author, David McKee, certainly complements Mark Adams' work and has his finger on the pulse (or, more accurately, on his mouse) with regard to the latest movings and shakings in the casino industry. His blog -- known for its signature acerbic wit -- is both a verbal and visual feast for anyone wanting to keep in the loop.
