All Grown Up: Las Vegas’ expansion charted in National Archives exhibit

Suzanne Struglinski

Tuesday, Dec. 7, 2004 | 10 a.m.

Las Vegas has grown so much during the last few decades, satellite photos of the city appear in a National Archives exhibit.

The photos, part of an exhibit to illustrate how the country has changed, appear in a section focusing on "The Changing Landscape."

Two aerial photographs of Las Vegas, one from 1943 and one from 1999, appear side by side on a video screen in the new "Public Vaults" exhibit at the National Archives in Washington.

The photos show the obvious difference in the city's size, roads and development as a blurb explains how 800 residents lived in Las Vegas in 1911, but 450,000 lived in the city by 2000.

Visitors can touch highlighted areas on the map to learn that Interstate 15 did not exist in 1943, and that the Boston and Fairchild Traffic Circle is now partially hidden by the Stratosphere.

The comparative photographs show how the country is still changing, said Exhibit Curator Bruce Bustard. He chose Las Vegas because he wanted photos that showed dramatic, but different, types of change. The photos also serve as an example of what the archives collects.

The exhibit also includes satellite photos of Mount St. Helens before and after it erupted in 1980 and photos of Orlando, Fla., and Anaheim, Calif., before and after Disney theme parks and other tourist attractions arrived. The "Frontiers and Boundaries" section includes an aerial shot of Hoover Dam from 1995 on the wall among older photos of Washington, D.C., Chicago and San Francisco. It also includes copies of a map of the boundary dispute between the United States and Britain over Maine, a petition to create the state that is now West Virginia and other maps showing how the country evolved into the shape known today.

The "Public Vaults" exhibit, which opened Nov. 12, aims to give visitors the feeling of going through the National Archives and Records Administration's massive collection of federal documents and records.

About a million tourists visit the archives each year to see the original Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights and the Constitution documents, but the agency wanted visitors to know more about what the collection actually holds. The new exhibit is behind the rotunda and explains exactly what the archives collects and how it is preserved for historical reference and research.

About 200,000 researchers visit the archives' 20 facilities each year, which include the presidential libraries. Many do genealogy research in military records, ship passenger manifests, citizenship documents and other papers.

But the archives holds many government documents beyond those used for a variety of purposes.

The 1943 photo of Las Vegas was taken by the Defense Intelligence Agency, most likely for training missions and for mapping, Bustard said.

The 1999 photo was from the U.S. Geological Survey's Earth Resources Observation Systems Data Center in South Dakota. Known as EROS, it is the main research center for the agency's National Mapping Division.

Another part of the exhibit explains the challenges the archives will face because of the addition of e-mail, computers and electronic documents to the government's day-to-day activities and the sheer increase in volume in government papers over time.

In a presentation on how papers have changed, a message from President Lincoln transmitting a letter from James W. Nye, Nevada territorial governor, quickly flashes on the screen.

It is not as obvious as the Las Vegas photos, but still another slice of Nevada on display for all to see.