Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 2, August 2001 | Page 128

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Popular Culture Review

from attracting families to attracting adults again was itself partially due to profits.
Visitors with children allocate an average of $296 to gamble while in town; visi
tors without children bring $504. And the “family friendly” ad campaign failed to
entice enough families to offset the losses.3
The advertising money works. More people visit Las Vegas than
visit Hawaii. More people visit Las Vegas than visit all of the major Florida-based
theme parks combined. Such massive levels of tourism are typically damaging to
an American city. Local infrastructure suffers so that funds can be diverted to make
the tourist sites better; “real” citizens move out, abandoning the city to the tourist;
and those that are left have their existence put on display for the amusement of
the guests — the tourist’s gaze places the native in a perpetual panopticon4 (indeed,
I recall that on my first trip to New York City I didn’t see any people at all, only
“New Yorkers”).
But as always, Vegas is different. Local infrastructure is growing in Las
Vegas at an ever-increasing rate. Yes, it is the site of the 24 hour drive-thru wed
ding chapel, but Las Vegas also has more churches — normal, everyday churches
not run by Elvis impersonators — per capita than any other city.5Yes, it is the town
where, as Frommer s reminds us, the hotels aren’t near the attractions, they are the
attractions6, but Vegas is constantly building schools, malls, and houses as well.
Indeed, this is a tourist city: at the intersection of the Strip (Las Vegas Boulevard)
and Tropicana Avenue there are more hotel rooms than in the entire city of San
Francisco. But not everyone is checking in just for a quick stay. In fact, the new
resident list is growing so fast that the city must publish the phone book twice a
year just to keep up.
Unsurprisingly, the growth in residents is due in large part to the growth
in tourism, which is to say gambling. So many casinos with so many gaming tables
and hotel rooms means a lot of work for “unskilled” labor; and with Las Vegas’
union-friendly atmosphere, that labor is typically well compensated. Hal Rothman,
an historian at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, suggests, in an often quoted
passage o f his book on the new American West, that this makes Las Vegas
“America’s last Detroit, the last place in the nation where relatively unskilled work
ers could find a job — earn a middle-class wage and expect to remain with the
company for their entire working life.”7 Unfortunately, this also contributes to the
town’s above average High School dropout rate and the fact that only 38% of
graduates go on to college.8 It is the lure of well-paying casino jobs that pulls
teenagers away from school; but while this is a particularly Vegas problem, it is
the country — the culture — as a whole that is to blame. Increasingly, education in
the United States is taken to be job-training, vocational preparation and rubberstamping, the minor leagues in w