Columnist Jon Ralston: A look back at next 100 years

Friday, May 13, 2005 | 5:34 a.m.

Jon Ralston hosts the news discussion program Face to Face on Las Vegas ONE and publishes the Ralston Report. He can be reached at (702) 870-7997 or at ralston@vegas.com.

WEEKEND EDITION

May 14 - 15, 2005

LAS VEGAS, May 15, 2105 -- As the celebration of the city's bicentennial climaxes today with a fireworks show over Oscar Plaza downtown, it's difficult not to look back over the last century and marvel where we were and how far we have come.

Sure, some people will always say the place was better when Oscar ran the town. But there will always be a mob that yearns for the good old days.

The mayor a hundred years ago was as Teflon as the town itself, both outwardly reinventing themselves to adapt to changing conditions but beneath the sheen remaining very much the same.

It is somehow fitting -- and yet sadly ironic -- that we celebrate the first 200 years this weekend with another auction reminiscent of the one that began it all in 1905, this one to sell off the last pieces of the once-famed 61 acres in old downtown. The baseball stadium, along with the Las Vegas Gangsters, is gone. The performing arts center, which could never compete with the one built in Summerlin's Stationland, has vanished. And the condo projects in the old downtown, like dark hulks, loom over the ancient former casinos, dark for decades, unfortunate monuments to bygone days.

So, too, is it an apt bicentennial bookend that Mayor Oscar Goodman IV, who is continuing the legacy of his great-great grandfather by redeveloping the new downtown (coincidentally surrounded by parcels the family had quietly gobbled up 50 years ago), will participate in a "Martinis with the Mayor" event at Red Rock Station.

That venerable casino, in the heart of Stationland, the new center of Las Vegas and the state, continues to hum along. And few who are alive today will remember that some locals once feared that the resort would obstruct a view of vacant land (imagine that concept!) once known as Red Rock Canyon, now the site of that sprawling Canyon Condos development and Canyon Station.

So many bicentennial memories creep in like bittersweet reminders of the way we were:

Professional sports never returned to Las Vegas. When the downtown effectively moved to Stationland, the surrounding condos were vacated and shops went bankrupt. It was a sad period, although Goodman IV has begun revitalizing Stationland the way his great-grandfather tried with Glitter Gulch.

After 200 years, what happens in Las Vegas will always happen in Las Vegas.