Columnist Hal Rothman: On his visit to Prague, historic city of the Old World, and its similarities to Las Vegas, the newest city of New World

Hal Rothman

Sunday, Dec. 4, 2005 | 8:19 a.m.

Hal Rothman is a professor of History at UNLV. His column appears Sunday.

The parallels between Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic, and Las Vegas might only be apparent to me, but on a recent visit I was struck by the similarities between this wonderfully medieval city and our home, the first city of the 21st century.

Like Las Vegas, Prague's economy depends on tourism. Dominated by the Prague Castle, the Charles Bridge and Wenceslas Square, Prague's core offers a fixed interpretation of a romantic past.

Called the "City of One Hundred Spires," Prague presents its religious and historic past now turned to commerce. Most nights there are a dozen or more classical music concerts in these fabulous medieval and Gothic churches. The acoustics are marvelous, but visitors couldn't tell the religious history of any of the churches, much less who was who in the Thirty Years War.

Every day Prague's workers stream to jobs in the center of the city, the core of the tourist economy. I watched Czech drivers sit in traffic, one to a car like American drivers.

Besides the cars with funny names and the narrow width of the roads, the only other difference I could detect was that nearly every Czech driver smoked. I never thought I'd see a place with a higher percentage of smokers than Las Vegas.

The stores in the core area were the same global chains we see almost everywhere. Specialty shops remained -- Czech crystal still is highly prized -- but mostly it was the International Colors of Benetton, the Gap and every other chain store you can imagine.

The Czech Republic's marvelous history was intertwined with global commerce, much as our faux re-creation of Paris and Venice do.

Tourist languages dominated Prague's center, not surprisingly with English the dominant tongue. No one I engaged could not speak some English, no less than enough to complete a commercial transaction, offer instructions or directions, or, at worst, guide me to someone whose English was a little bit better.

American music and culture served as backdrops, teaching both language and culture. In a cab, the radio blared: "I bet you wish your girlfriend was hot like me." My Czech driver rocked all the way, singing along in broken English.

Prague even has its own specialty niche in tourism, mirroring the phenomenal number of niches in our economy. It has turned its old Jewish ghetto into the Jewish quarter, a seven-stop collection of synagogues, a cemetery, a community building and the old town hall that collectively present a history of Czech Judaism and the Holocaust.

Despite its obvious draw to American Jews, always a lucrative tourist market, this story, replete with 16th century structures, has strong international meaning. I saw tour groups speaking Japanese, Russian, French, Spanish and Portuguese visiting the area.

Prague sells its past, with all its complexity and horror. Unlike Las Vegas, it is a fixed template, something that can be augmented with bells and whistles -- concerts in churches and the like -- but that relies on people's ongoing appreciation of both architecture and history.

The city also has a peculiar cachet, much like Las Vegas' iconographic position as the first city of leisure. Prague is the only major European city not destroyed by bombing during World War II, so its medieval and early modern character remains intact.

The result is both a skyline and a series of structures in proximity to one another that feels truly old. The sensation is hard to replicate.

Prague sells its oldness, Las Vegas sells the new. On the surface, they couldn't be more different. But underneath, in the way commerce and attraction are combined, the way the part of the city designed for visitors is turned over to them, in a manner that people commute to that area to work but live their lives elsewhere, Prague and Las Vegas are strangely the same.

Tourism works its economic magic in different ways, but the structures that it sets up are much the same. Scratch any pair of tourist towns, look at the combination of infrastructure and people that underpin them, and they start to look alike.

That two places as different as Prague and Las Vegas would share so much tells us that the world is even smaller than we thought. It also implies that the future of the world economy is us traveling to Prague and giving them our money and them flying here and giving it back.