{"id":8701,"date":"2012-03-22T11:22:31","date_gmt":"2012-03-22T19:22:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/?p=8701"},"modified":"2012-03-22T11:22:31","modified_gmt":"2012-03-22T19:22:31","slug":"saucer-crash-whither-harmon-crossing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/saucer-crash-whither-harmon-crossing\/","title":{"rendered":"Saucer crash; Whither Harmon Crossing?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Yesterday afternoon, a heterogenous smattering of Las Vegas<\/strong> media toured the new Area 51<\/strong> wing of the National Atomic Testing Museum<\/strong>.”Wing” might be a generous term for this cramped, fetid space. The subtitle of the exhibit is Myth or Reality<\/em>, a misnomer, since the museum tries to address both the real and<\/em> mythic aspects of Area 51. (Based on yesterday’s reminiscences by some former workers, the actuality seems for more interesting than the legend.) Unfortunately, limitations of space — the Testing Museum had wanted to move its entire kit ‘n kaboodle from UNLV<\/strong> to the Reed Whipple Center<\/strong>, downtown, but was thwarted — leave one with the impression that we’re getting a tantalizing but very incomplete glimpse of what Area 51 was actually like.<\/p>\n

\"\"Worse, the inspiration for the exhibit seems to have been the Mob Experience<\/strong> at the Tropicana Las Vegas<\/strong>. There’s a scaled-down version of the same shtick, complete with a couple of costumed docents (including the requisite Man In Black<\/strong>). Also, the initial series of displays, which include wacky former Lt. Gov. Lonnie Hammergren<\/strong> pretending to conduct an alien autopsy, make the whole thing look like a put-on. By playing into urban mythology, the Testing Museum blurs the all-important line between fact and fiction. Test pilots and UFOs<\/strong> alike are given frustratingly short shrift. There are too many video monitors in close proximity to one another, creating a Babel of overlapping audio feeds (and, no, keeping the individual volume settings frustratingly low doesn’t help). Dim lighting makes many of the explanatory plaques and enlarged newspaper clippings illegible, at least for those of us who wear spectacles. There’s many a groovy airplane model and some exciting footage of supersonic flight but the overall impression that one’s been “had” is difficult to shake. Well-intentioned though it is, Area 51: Myth or Reality?<\/em> is awfully close to qualifying as a tourist trap and not quite worth venturing off the Strip.<\/p>\n

Buyer’s remorse?<\/strong> Nobody else wanted the weirdly configured scrap of land that was left over when Clark County<\/strong> finished rerouting Harmon Avenue<\/strong> around CityCenter<\/strong>. Ergo, developer Brett Torino<\/strong> got it. When I interviewed him last fall<\/a>, he hinted that Caesars Entertainment<\/strong> was among those who had second thoughts and tried to buy the acreage back from him but he wouldn’t say anything outright. Meanwhile, Torino’s Harmon Crossing<\/strong> has fallen months behind its planned, mid-December debut and Torino’s peeps are in run-silent, run-deep mode … as I discovered when I tried to do a follow up piece for Beth Schwartz<\/strong>‘s Luxury<\/em> magazine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday afternoon, a heterogenous smattering of Las Vegas media toured the new Area 51 wing of the National Atomic Testing Museum.”Wing” might be a generous term for this cramped, fetid space. The subtitle of the exhibit is Myth or Reality, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[48,65,56,28,51,4,7,140,9,19],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8701"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8701"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8701\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8705,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8701\/revisions\/8705"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}