Las Vegas

/lahs vay"geuhs/

1. a city in SE Nevada. 164,674.

2. a city in central New Mexico. 14,322.

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City (pop., 2000: 478,434), southeastern Nevada, U.S. It is famous for its luxury hotels, casinos, and nightclubs, located in the downtown area known as "the Strip.

" Mormons from Utah settled the site in 1855 and abandoned it in 1857. It became a railroad town in 1905 and was incorporated in 1911. Gambling was legalized in 1931, and Las Vegas expanded rapidly after 1940. Its connections to crime syndicates began in 1946, when Bugsy Siegel opened the Flamingo Hotel. By the early 21st century it was one of the country's fastest-growing metropolitan areas, attracting a year-round population as well as tourists.

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▪ Nevada, United States

Introduction

 city, seat (1909) of Clark county, southeastern Nevada, U.S. The only major city in the American West to have been founded in the 20th century, Las Vegas grew from a tiny, desert-bound railroad service centre at the outset of the 20th century to the country's fastest-growing metropolis at century's end. This transformation—made possible by a combination of shrewd entrepreneurship, access to water, an extensive transportation network, and permissive state laws—has created the city now often known simply as “Vegas,” a place of vast casinos, elaborate hotels, and spectacular entertainment venues that attracts masses of visitors from throughout the world.

      Las Vegas is Nevada's economic centre and largest city. Its metropolitan area, with more than twice the number of people outside the city limits as within them, contains roughly three-fourths of the state's population. Area 83 square miles (215 square km). Pop. (2000) city, 478,434; Las Vegas–Paradise MSA, 1,375,765; (2006 est.) city, 552,539; Las Vegas–Paradise MSA, 1,777,539.

Character of the city

      Las Vegas is a place of million-lightbulb signs and fantastic architecture, of readily visible wealth and carefully hidden poverty. It is a place of superlatives, both positive and negative. Within the city stand the largest glass pyramid in the world; one of the largest hotels in the country, with more than 5,000 rooms; and one of the most expensive hotels ever constructed, the Bellagio. The area along Las Vegas Boulevard and its adjoining near-downtown streets—the famous “Strip”—is the “City Without Clocks,” whose multibillion-dollar economy is devoted to servicing a wide array of impulses and addictions of many kinds. It is this Las Vegas, the flashy playground unofficially known as “Sin City,” that the American novelist and essayist Joan Didion (Didion, Joan) once termed

the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements, bizarre and beautiful in its venality and in its devotion to immediate gratification.

      Downtown Las Vegas is built to serve not residents but guests—tens of millions annually. Once derided as a cultural backwater, Las Vegas has evolved into an economic power that outstrips the output of whole countries. It is one of the country's leading vacation destinations, drawing far more tourists than the Grand Canyon or Yellowstone National Park.

      Beyond the bright lights of the Strip, however, lies a perfectly ordinary Western city, with neighbourhoods, churches, shopping centres, and strip malls. It is that city, and not the hotels and casinos, that draws thousands of new residents each year. This growth, coupled with its unusual economic basis, has made Las Vegas one of the wealthiest cities in the country, but it has also brought problems to the area. Las Vegas is among the country's leaders in personal and property crimes, as well as suicide rates, alcohol consumption, and illegal drug use. The city also suffers the modern urban ills of air and water pollution, and the roads are choked with increasingly heavy traffic as new suburbs spring up in all directions.

Landscape

City site

 Las Vegas's historic core lies at a site once occupied by marshes, freshwater springs, and grassy meadows (hence the city's name; vegas is Spanish for “meadows”), long since covered by streets, buildings, and parking lots. The modern-day city sprawls across a broad, arid valley at an elevation of roughly 2,000 feet (610 metres). The valley fans out eastward from the picturesque, pine-clad Spring Mountains, whose highest point, Charleston Peak, rises above 11,910 feet (3,630 metres). To the north lie three lower ranges, the Pintwater, Spotted, and Desert mountains, and to the east are the McCullough and Sheep ranges. A wide pass between those two ranges leads to Hoover Dam and Lake Mead (Mead, Lake), the huge reservoir on the Colorado River impounded by the dam; Las Vegas Wash, the valley's major drainage, leads through this route.

      Surrounded by mountains, the Las Vegas Valley is a basin that collects the scant rainwater and snowmelt that reach it. Underlying that basin is a series of aquifers that once led out into small springs near the site of what is now the downtown area. These springs, most of which have dried up because of excessive groundwater pumping, historically flowed into the Colorado River toward the Pacific Ocean. The southern limit of the Great Basin reaches to just 15 miles (24 km) north of Las Vegas; its waters, which have no outlet to the sea, disappear into a vast inland desert.

      The Las Vegas Valley is ecologically part of the Mojave Desert, whose characteristic plant is the Joshua tree. The smallest of the North American deserts, the Mojave supports significant human settlement only in the Las Vegas area and at a few points along the Colorado River. More than four-fifths of the city's water supply comes from the Colorado River at Lake Mead. The remainder is pumped from underground aquifers. As more water has been removed from these aquifers, the sandy soils have subsided, leading to fissuring and structural damage of the surface and the formation of large sinkholes. These fissures are compounded by the damage caused by occasional earthquakes; the Las Vegas Valley, particularly its northwest quadrant, lies in an active fault zone.

Climate

      Las Vegas is hot and dry for most of the year. The average daily temperature is 68 °F (20 °C); the average high is 80 °F (27 °C) and the average low is 56 °F (13 °C). January is the coldest month, with average daily temperatures ranging from 57 °F (14 °C) to 37 °F (3 °C); freezing temperatures are uncommon in the valley but normal for the surrounding foothills. July is the hottest month, with average daily highs and lows of 104 °F (40° C) and 78 °F (26 °C).

      Las Vegas lies only some 100 miles (160 km) east of Death Valley, one of the hottest and driest places in the country, with an average annual precipitation of only 4 inches (100 mm). The area has endured rainless periods of up to two years, although on average no year is without some precipitation. Most precipitation occurs in the winter months, when cooler ground temperatures allow moisture-laden clouds from the Pacific Ocean to cross the mountain barrier that normally produces a rain shadow. When rain does fall, it can be torrential and can trigger highly destructive flash floods.

City layout

      The old downtown at the centre of the city became overshadowed in the 1950s by the Strip, the portion of Las Vegas Boulevard (and adjoining side streets) running some 4 miles (6 km) to the southwest, where the city's most ostentatious and luxurious hotels, restaurants, casinos, and restaurants were built. The city spreads outward in all directions from Las Vegas Boulevard; the metropolitan area covers all of Clark county, a portion of Nye county to the northwest, and a small part of Mohave county, Ariz., to the southeast. It includes the incorporated areas of Boulder City, Henderson, and North Las Vegas as well as the unincorporated areas of Paradise, Winchester, Spring Valley, Lake Mead Shores, and Sunrise Manor. These areas are joined by several arterial roads, including the Bruce Woodbury (Las Vegas) Beltway, a ring road through the Las Vegas Valley.

 Las Vegas is an amalgamation of many neighbourhoods. One of the more unusual is the planned community of Summerlin, partly outside the city limits. Built on land that was originally purchased by the wealthy industrialist, aviator, and motion-picture producer Howard Hughes (Hughes, Howard) in the 1950s, Summerlin was later developed beginning in 1990. About half of Las Vegas's population lives in single-family homes located in ethnically homogeneous communities. Another large segment lives in apartments and town houses, many in developments built around golf courses, artificial lakes, and greenbelts that stand in sharp contrast to the tawny desert beyond.

People

 From its first settlement by Mormons in the mid-19th century, Las Vegas has been populated predominantly by people of European (white) ancestry. Some three-fourths of the population is white. Only a small proportion of the population today is Mormon. About a third is Roman Catholic, and there is a sizable Jewish minority.

      Several hundred Chinese immigrants were drawn to the region in the mid-19th century to help build the railroad that would join Las Vegas to other cities in the mountain region and on the Pacific coast. About the same time, Basque sheepherders came to the area, introducing an Iberian culture quite distinct from that of Spanish-speaking Mexicans living there. African Americans arrived in the 19th century, most of them as cowboys and seasonal ranch workers, and their numbers grew in the years during and after World War II, when many were stationed in the area for military service or arrived to work in defense-related industries.

      African Americans now constitute a substantial minority, more than one-tenth of the city's population. Hispanics account for more than one-fourth of the total, many of them recent immigrants from Mexico and Central America who work largely in the service sector. Relatively small numbers of Asians and Native Americans round out the city's ethnic composition, as do Pacific Islanders, who moved to Las Vegas in such numbers that many Hawaiian immigrants refer to it as the “ninth island.”

      Ethnic discrimination was common in the city's earlier days but has subsided somewhat since the late 1960s. Few African Americans or Hispanics worked on the Hoover Dam project during the 1930s, even after the federal government ordered the consortium building it to halt such discriminatory practices; those who were hired were employed only as common labourers. Jim Crow (Jim Crow law) segregation (segregation, racial) practices were introduced in Las Vegas in 1947 as a means of placating the city's growing white tourist clientele; only one casino, the Moulin Rouge, which was partially owned by the African American heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis (Louis, Joe), was open to both blacks and whites. The rest of the city's casinos voluntarily desegregated in the mid-1950s, but de facto segregation existed elsewhere in Nevada until the mid-1960s. In 1968 Governor Paul Laxalt initiated several far-reaching reforms that were meant to ease growing ethnic tensions. Even so, race riots broke out in 1969 and 1970. From the early 1970s to the early 1990s, Las Vegas schools employed a comprehensive desegregation plan. Although school desegregation experienced setbacks after the plan was dismantled, the overall process of integration continued, and by the early 21st century several African Americans had been elected to the city council.

      Americans of Italian and Irish ancestry have long been prominent in the city's politics, although each group constitutes only a small minority of the population. Since the 1950s Las Vegas has also had a growing homosexual community that has made substantial contributions to its cultural life.

      The people of Las Vegas range across social classes, from the very rich, including many new immigrants from Asia and Europe, to the very poor. The numbers of the latter are growing rapidly as immigrants arrive from Mexico and Central America seeking work, usually finding it in the service sector and the manual trades.

Economy

      Agriculture formed the basis of the Las Vegas economy from the mid-19th to the early 20th century. The city's outlying areas continued to depend on farming and ranching until the 1980s, when the rising cost of obtaining subsurface and river water for fields and pastures caused many to abandon their operations. Whereas agriculture had accounted for the vast majority of water use in the area, the city's municipal needs began to grow with an increase in population. Since the 1990s, Las Vegas has had one of the fastest-growing employment bases in the country, benefiting from a large labour pool and from a favourable business climate. These conditions enabled city promoters to entice businesses of all kinds to choose Las Vegas over California.

Manufacturing

      Mining constitutes the mainstay of the region's industrial sector; minerals extracted from the several facilities in the area include silver, gold, lead, and molybdenum. Manufacturing has grown in importance, with most of the plants concentrated in the communities of Henderson and North Las Vegas. Construction has long been a significant component of the economy, serving the rapidly growing population.

Finance and other services

      Although Las Vegas claims to have a diversified economy, the service sector unquestionably is dominant. In reality, the city is essentially a one-company town—that “company” being gambling and tourism. The growth of tourism has been phenomenal, especially since the city began promoting itself more as a family-oriented vacation destination in the 1990s. In addition, trade shows and conventions account for an ever-growing portion of tourism revenues. The Las Vegas Convention Center is one of the largest such facilities in the country.

      Some two-thirds of all jobs in the region are service-related. The largest concentrations are in the numerous hotels, casinos, and other tourist-related enterprises, where wages typically are low. Nonetheless, labour is well-organized, and union membership is high. Government-related employment is also important; Nellis Air Force Base, adjacent to North Las Vegas, is the metropolitan area's single largest employer. In addition, wholesale and retail trade and financial services are all significant components of the regional economy.

Transportation

      Until the early 20th century, Las Vegas was isolated from other population centres and was connected to Los Angeles and Salt Lake City by only a wagon route that required weeks to traverse. That changed in 1904, when a line from the San Pedro, Los Angeles & Salt Lake Railroad to Las Vegas was completed. Today Las Vegas is a regional hub for the Union Pacific Railroad (Union Pacific Railroad Company) and is served by Amtrak.

      The city's network of county, state, and federal roads is inadequate to meet the transportation needs of the growing population, and Las Vegas Boulevard, portions of the interstate highway, and other arterial roads are often crowded. The city has undertaken a large-scale program of road improvements, the centrepiece of which is the Bruce Woodbury Beltway, constructed as a joint venture with other municipalities in the metropolitan area. The basic road was completed in 2003, and work has continued on converting its entire 53 miles (85 km) into a limited-access highway. The city maintains an extensive bus system, and a privately built and operated monorail connects many casinos and other attractions on the Strip.

      McCarran International Airport is among the fastest-growing airports in the country. The Southern Nevada Foreign Trade Zone—a free-trade zone that includes the airport and allows a variety of goods to be imported duty-free or with reduced excise taxes—has increased the region's attractiveness to international business interests.

Administration and society

Government

      Las Vegas operates on a council-manager system. The city manager is responsible for the daily operations of government and administration. The city council comprises seven members, including six members elected by ward as well as the mayor, who presides over the council. All serve four-year terms. The council and the city manager's office oversee a number of commissions and boards.

Municipal services and health

      Responsibility for providing a range of services to the citizenry is shared by the city, the board of supervisors for Clark county, and the governments of nearby municipalities. Las Vegas maintains an airport and road authority, a municipal court system, police and fire departments, waste-management operations, water treatment and delivery facilities, public parks, and public libraries. The city's municipal park system expanded rapidly in the late 1990s to include such new facilities as Children's Memorial Park, northwest of downtown, and Heritage Park, which adjoins the Las Vegas Natural History Museum.

      The most important component of the region's infrastructure is its water supply, and water availability is the largest single variable affecting Las Vegas's sustainability and future growth. Groundwater long constituted the water supply when agriculture accounted for most regional water use. However, urban water demand rose dramatically with the rapid and sustained growth of Las Vegas after 1950, and planners turned to the vast resources of Lake Mead to provide the additional water. The massive Southern Nevada (now Robert B. Griffith) Water Project, funded jointly by the federal and state governments and built between 1968 and the early 1980s (with subsequent expansion), is a complex of distribution and treatment facilities that draws from Lake Mead and now supplies the bulk of regional water needs. The federal government transferred control of the project in 2001 to the state-operated Southern Nevada Water Authority.

      About a dozen hospitals serve the Las Vegas metropolitan area. The University Medical Center of Southern Nevada, part of the University of Nevada system, is a teaching hospital with an emphasis on pulmonary and cardiac disease; it has grown to national prominence in neurosurgery and neurology and maintains the state's major facility for treating burn victims. Several private institutions offer general medical care and maintain specialized units that treat diabetes, kidney diseases, sleep disorders, and other maladies.

Education

      Although the Clark county public school system—one of the largest in the country—is held to be good overall, its high schools have an unusually high dropout rate by national standards, and the proportion of high school graduates who enroll in universities and colleges is one of the lowest in the country. Federal and state funding policies have encouraged the development of private schools as alternatives to the public schools.

      Higher education in the Las Vegas area centres on the two-year Community College of Southern Nevada, which has several regional campuses, and the four-year University of Nevada (Nevada, University of), Las Vegas (1957). College tuition costs for state residents are among the lowest in the West.

Cultural life

 Las Vegas has had a relatively small number of what might be considered traditional civic cultural institutions—e.g., orchestras, theatre companies, and public art museums—for a city of its size. Instead, much of the city's cultural life has tended to centre on its casinos (casino) and hotels, many of which are masterpieces of monumental architecture; situated along the dazzling promenade of Las Vegas Boulevard, they are open to the public without charge.

      Until the late 1980s, Las Vegas casino architecture tended to favour low ceilings (which minimize cooling and heating costs) and dark spaces in which the difference between day and night was indiscernible and thus encouraged patrons to remain there. Entertainment was also geared almost solely toward adults. One of the earliest of these establishments, the Golden Nugget Casino, was in its day the largest of the city's gambling houses. It became a model for those that followed it, the basic concept being a nondescript building festooned with ever-larger, brighter, and gaudier electric signs. An exception to this model at the time was Caesars Palace, an oval architectural marvel containing numerous large fountains and thousands of tons of imported Mediterranean marble; its spectacular qualities were diminished somewhat by the later addition next door of a multistory shopping mall.

      With the construction of such complexes as the Mirage (opened 1989) and Mandalay Bay (1999), Las Vegas casino architecture departed completely from the forms of the 1950s and '60s, becoming even more spectacular. These newer buildings tended to favour huge atria and vaulted ceilings, sometimes with glass roofs that allowed daylight to enter. In addition, the attractions became increasingly dazzling; among those featured at the Mirage itself were a working model of a volcano, Siberian tigers, and a microcosmic rainforest. More recent additions include replicas of the Eiffel Tower, the New York City skyline, the Grand Canyon, Egypt's Valley of the Kings, and Venice, as well as a faux-Arthurian castle. These enterprises—which increasingly became resorts for the whole family as much as they were casinos—lent Las Vegas the air of a gigantic theme park, a paragon of what the architecture critic Reyner Banham called the “fantasticating tendency” of the American West.

      Inside, the resorts and casinos began displaying other, more traditional treasures. The Bellagio, which opened in 1998, featured a magnificent collection of paintings by such masters as Vincent van Gogh (Gogh, Vincent van), Jackson Pollock (Pollock, Jackson), Claude Monet (Monet, Claude), Pablo Picasso (Picasso, Pablo), and Henri Matisse (Matisse, Henri). Similarly, the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum—located within the Venetian casino and hotel complex—features exhibitions of works from the Guggenheim Museum in New York City and Russia's State Hermitage museum. Inside the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, a 12,000-seat sports-and-entertainment complex was installed, inaugurated in 1999 by a series of performances by Italian opera tenor Luciano Pavarotti (Pavarotti, Luciano). The Rio All-Suite Casino has frequently hosted touring exhibits from around the world, including a collection of art from the Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg (Saint Petersburg).

      Next to casino gambling, nothing more defines Las Vegas in the world's eye than its renowned nightlife. Visitors have flocked to the city for decades to catch a Vegas show, be it a one-person stand-up comedy act or a lavish production featuring dozens of dancers. The range of shows offered is vast, and famous entertainers at the peak of their popularity—or perhaps just past it—often grace marquees for weeks or months at a time. In addition, the city has become known for its fine dining, dispelling its earlier image of a town with inexpensive, mediocre casino food.

      The region does support a number of more conventional cultural institutions, including the Las Vegas Art Museum, Las Vegas Natural History Museum, Liberace Museum, and Nevada State Museum and Historical Society.

      Opportunities for outdoor recreation abound in the area. Two of the most popular nearby attractions include Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area, just west of the city, and Lake Mead National Recreation Area, which encompasses a large area that extends into northwestern Arizona. Also within easy reach of the metropolitan area are three state parks—Spring Mountain Ranch (southwest), Floyd Lamb (northwest), and Valley of Fire (northeast). Skiing is available in winter in the Spring Mountains.

      Popular spectator events in the area include two major professional golf tournaments each year, the annual National Finals Rodeo (late fall), and a variety of automobile races at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway. In addition, regular air shows at Nellis Air Force Base—the home of the Thunderbirds, the U.S. Air Force Air Demonstration Squadron—draw large crowds. The World Series of Poker is held annually in Las Vegas.

      Although a resolutely modern city, Las Vegas has taken increasing interest in preserving its historic architecture. Several buildings have been placed on the National Register of Historic Places, among them the Las Vegas Mormon Fort (1855), the Little Church of the West (1942), and the Las Vegas Grammar School (1936).

History

The early period

      Paleo-Indian (Stone Age) peoples, whose descendants include the Paiute, were the first inhabitants in the area, some 12,000 years ago. Their tools have been discovered at several sites in the Las Vegas Valley. The Ancestral Pueblo (Ancestral Pueblo culture) (Anasazi) and Paiute peoples came later and migrated between seasonal camps in the mountains and the valley. The first Europeans known to have entered the area were members of a Spanish exploration party led by Santa Fe trader Antonio Armijo and a scout, Rafael Rivera, who were seeking a new route from Santa Fe to Los Angeles. Arriving in the area in 1829 and noting its wetlands and meadows, Armijo described it on his map as Las Vegas. In that same year the first Americans to see the area were in a trapping party that included frontiersman Kit Carson (Carson, Kit); he returned 15 years later as guide for the pioneering mission to the region led by John Charles Frémont (Frémont, John C).

      In 1855 a group of Mormon missionaries settled in the area. Led by church elder William Bringhurst, the Mormons built a log fort surrounded by garden plots and fields of grain. In 1856 Bringhurst's men discovered lead in the Spring Mountains, and Mormon church leader Brigham Young (Young, Brigham) sent metallurgists from Salt Lake City to develop a mine for the purpose of making tools and ammunition. The find did not become profitable at that time but was developed during World War I as the Potosi mine, a rich source of galena ore and silver.

      The land and climate were harsh, however, and the crops failed the second year, which led to internal dissent and Bringhurst's dismissal. Under the leadership of Samuel Thompson, the settlers again faced hardships in 1857, as insects devoured most of that year's crops. The dispirited Mormon missionaries abandoned the fort at the end of the year. Other Mormons came to the area in the next few years, notably Daniel and Ann Bonelli, who operated a ferry on the Colorado River. The Las Vegas Valley—part of Arizona Territory until 1866, when it joined the state of Nevada—remained little explored and thinly populated for several decades. The census of 1900 counted only 30 people, almost all of whom were employees of a cattle ranch that had been established near the site of the old Mormon fort.

The early 20th century

      At the turn of the 20th century, Las Vegas was much smaller than Searchlight, a mining town about 60 miles (100 km) to the south. The community's fortunes improved, however, with the arrival of William A. Clark, a mining magnate and politician from Montana for whom the present-day county was named. Clark, a principal investor in the company building a railroad from Los Angeles to Salt Lake City, recognized that the artesian springs of Las Vegas would provide a reliable water source along the route. He purchased a large tract of land in the Las Vegas Valley, secured water rights to the springs there, and arranged for a railroad depot to be built. Clark also exercised his political and economic clout, openly bribing legislators to secure favours for the railroad.

      In 1905 Clark organized an auction of his landholdings near the new railroad depot and station café, which included the town's first casino. The auction, heavily advertised in the railroad's two terminal cities, far exceeded Clark's expectations and resulted in the sale of nearly every available lot. Clark used a portion of the proceeds to build a pipeline from the springs to the depot and dig a well, which would assure a steady water supply for the new town. He also helped fund the construction of secondary rail lines to the mining towns of Tonopah and Goldfield.

      Las Vegas grew slowly at first—with the exception of one area, which rapidly developed as a legally sanctioned zone of prostitution and gambling. The zone suffered a modest setback in 1910 when the Nevada legislature outlawed gambling. In response, the casinos went underground and continued to flourish covertly until gambling was again legalized in 1931. Las Vegas, which was officially founded on May 15, 1905, was incorporated on March 16, 1911, two years after it had been named the county seat.

Development as a tourist destination

 Clark sold his share of the railroad to the Union Pacific Company in 1921. Small ranches began to pop up in and around Las Vegas, some of them thinly disguised brothels, and the town soon became a popular weekend destination for residents of Los Angeles. An influx of people who worked in the Hollywood movie industry helped fuel a growth spurt, bringing the population to more than 5,000 by 1930. Californians were lured not only by the climate and gambling but also by Nevada's newly relaxed divorce laws, which required only a six-week residency in the state before one was eligible to file for divorce. Construction of the Boulder (later Hoover (Hoover Dam)) Dam across nearby Black Canyon in the 1930s, during the height of the Great Depression, proved to be a tremendous boon for Las Vegas. The project, one of the largest and most ambitious public works endeavours ever undertaken by the federal government, would come to provide the two key commodities that made contemporary Las Vegas possible: water and electric power. More immediately, the city benefited from the thousands of dam builders who came to the small town each weekend, lured by the handful of casinos and other diversions.

Wartime and early postwar growth

      With the advent of World War II, Las Vegas grew even larger as the dam builders were followed by defense workers and military personnel. Nevada Senator Pat McCarran successfully lobbied the federal government to establish two major installations near Las Vegas in 1941: a magnesium-processing plant southeast of the city in Henderson and a military airfield just to the northeast. The latter, now Nellis Air Force Base, eventually grew to occupy an area of some 1,350 square miles (3,500 square km), including the U.S. Air Force's vast testing range northwest of the city. These and other defense-related installations set up in the region brought in thousands more people. Hotel owners, encouraged by the large influx of newcomers, began to offer entertainment featuring top-name performers such as Frank Sinatra (Sinatra, Frank), Tommy Dorsey (Dorsey, Jimmy), and the Andrews Sisters.

      After World War II, many of the returning soldiers chose to settle in the Las Vegas area. Their decision was made easier because air-conditioning systems were rapidly being installed in buildings, which made Las Vegas and the rest of the Southwest much more habitable during the hot summer months. Growth was rapid, the city's population nearly tripling between 1940 and 1950 and more than doubling again in the following decade.

Emergence of the contemporary city

 The prospect of enormous profits from legalized gambling and prostitution proved to be a strong attraction for organized crime syndicates. In 1945 Bugsy Siegel (Siegel, Bugsy), one of the most prominent of these criminals, began constructing the Flamingo, the city's first major casino and hotel complex. He incurred a large debt with Meyer Lansky (Lansky, Meyer) and other mob associates, and the first months of the Flamingo's operation were shaky. It opened for good in March 1947, but Siegel was murdered shortly thereafter—according to one theory, at the behest of Lansky and other disgruntled investors—and Lansky immediately took over the business. The Flamingo's enormous success encouraged more ventures, and several new casinos sprang up along what had become known as the Strip: the Thunderbird in 1948, the Desert Inn in 1950, the Sands and the Sahara in 1952, and the Riviera, the Royal Nevada, and the Dunes in 1955.

      Although organized crime largely created contemporary Las Vegas, its dominance was short-lived. By the late 1950s the newly established Nevada Gaming Commission—which was responsible for licensing and overseeing gambling operations—began to curtail severely the freedom of gangsters to operate in the city. In the early 1960s the commission formulated its so-called “Black Book”; seeking to remove corruption from the gambling industry, the commission listed people with criminal records and banned from the casinos anyone listed in the book. Through vigorous enforcement of the law and the removal of corrupt public officials, the commission largely succeeded in separating crime organizations from the casinos, and corporations later took their place.

      Also of importance to the development of the city were private individuals, among them Wilbur Clark, the owner of the Desert Inn, who proposed that the federal government retire its World War II–era debts by holding a national lottery, and Howard Hughes (Hughes, Howard), who kept a suite at the Desert Inn throughout the 1950s and lived there permanently from 1966 to 1970. Some of the investments made by Hughes proved to be failures, including the costly Landmark Casino, which went bankrupt, but others were outstanding successes that brought Hughes vast profits. The Howard Hughes Parkway, a major thoroughfare that skirts the University of Nevada and McCarran International Airport, honours his many contributions to the city's development.

      The area also became well known in the 1950s and '60s for the nuclear weapons tests conducted at the federal government's Nevada Test Site, some 65 miles (105 km) from Las Vegas. At first the local populace responded favourably to these events, which could easily be seen by city dwellers; for a time, the atomic bomb's mushroom cloud was even incorporated into the official seal of Clark county. Soon, however, protests were mounted against aboveground testing, forcing the government to conduct its experiments underground; Hughes, one of the most influential protestors, argued that open-air testing would drive visitors away from the city. It also became apparent in later years that exposure to nuclear fallout from those tests was yielding a high incidence of radiation-related cancers.

      Las Vegas continued to grow in the 1960s, thanks in part to the publicity brought by such popular entertainers as Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr. (Davis, Sammy, Jr.), Wayne Newton, and Elvis Presley (Presley, Elvis), all of whom became residents there. Its growth faltered only for a few years, beginning with a nationwide economic recession in the late 1970s; in addition, tourism declined after a fire at the MGM Grand Hotel killed more than 80 people in November 1980. Entrepreneur Steve Wynn, who had operated the Golden Nugget Casino since the early 1970s, used the downturn to acquire and renovate old casinos and build new ones, foremost among them the lavishly expensive Mirage, which opened in 1989.

      In the late 1980s the city's overall growth accelerated to match that of its gaming and tourist economy. The city's population increased by nearly 100,000 between 1980 and 1990 to exceed a quarter million, and it surpassed the half-million mark early in the 21st century. The metropolitan area reached one million inhabitants in the mid-1990s and was well on its way to doubling that number a decade later.

      The venerable Dunes was demolished in October 1993—in true Vegas tradition, as a spectacle in front of a huge crowd of onlookers. It was the last of the city's 1950s-era hotels, and its destruction symbolically ushered in a new era of elite hotels, including the Venetian and the Bellagio. In addition, these new hotels were concentrated in fewer hands; the MGM Grand Corporation bought the Mirage Resorts Corporation in March 2000, effectively ending Steve Wynn's chairmanship and bringing several major resorts under one corporate umbrella. Wynn, however, remained a presence in the city, opening a new casino resort complex in 2005. In a city that has long been characterized by such periods of sweeping growth and change, tourism and its vast array of ancillary services have provided Las Vegas with its most constant measure of continuity over the years.

Gregory Lewis McNamee

Additional Reading

Russell R. Elliott, History of Nevada, 2nd rev. ed. (1987), is a thoroughly documented narrative of the state's past and includes a significant amount of information on Las Vegas. James W. Hulse, The Silver State: Nevada's Heritage Reinterpreted, 3rd ed. (2004); and David Thomson, In Nevada: The Land, the People, God, and Chance (1999), offer stimulating accounts of the city's changing fortunes. Eugene P. Moehring, Resort City in the Sunbelt: Las Vegas 1930–2000, 2nd ed. (2000); Ronald A. Farrell and Carole Case, The Black Book and the Mob: The Untold Story of the Control of Nevada's Casinos (1995); Sally Denton and Roger Morris, The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America, 1947–2000 (2002); Virgil Hancock and Gregory McNamee, American Byzantium (2001); and A. Costandina Titus, Bombs in the Backyard: Atomic Testing and American Politics, 2nd ed. (2001), deal with particular aspects of the city's history. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form (1972, reprinted 2000), is a much-praised, although now dated, work of architectural criticism. David Littlejohn (ed.), The Real Las Vegas: Life Beyond the Strip (1999), is an essay collection that looks at the city behind the casinos and luxury hotels, the city known by its residents rather than its visitors. Hal K. Rothman and Mike Davis (eds.), The Grit Beneath the Glitter: Tales from the Real Las Vegas (2002), gathers sometimes acerbic essays on the same topic.Gregory Lewis McNamee

▪ New Mexico, United States

      city, seat (1862) of San Miguel county, north-central New Mexico, U.S. It lies along the Gallinas River, at an elevation of 6,435 feet (1,961 metres), in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The original settlement (1835) developed as the Mexican port of entry on the Santa Fe Trail. The city was named Nuestra Señora de los Dolores de Las Vegas Grande (Spanish: “Our Lady of the Sorrows of the Great Meadows”), its shortened name referring to the area's rich grasslands. Las Vegas was claimed by General Stephen Kearny (Kearny, Stephen Watts) for the United States on August 15, 1846, and Fort Union (now a national monument), 20 miles (32 km) northeast, was built in 1852. When the Santa Fe Railway arrived in 1879 another settlement sprang up around its depot, one mile away. The “new” and “old” communities of Las Vegas were incorporated as a city and town respectively in 1881. They were unified under one city charter in 1970.

      Las Vegas is a shipping point for wool, livestock, lumber, and dairy products and is a tourist base for a scenic resort area including the Santa Fe National Forest. It is the home of New Mexico Highlands University (founded as a teachers college in 1893).

      Twenty-one of the Rough Riders (Rough Rider) recruited by Theodore Roosevelt hailed from Las Vegas, and, until 1969, the city hosted an annual reunion for the “ ‘Teddy' Roosevelt Rough Riders to the last man.” The event is commemorated by the Las Vegas City Museum and Rough Riders' Collection. Inc. 1888. Pop. (1990) 14,753; (2000) 14,565.

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