Hal Rothman on how the valley’s growth pattern has helped shape the future of the American downtown

Sunday, July 9, 2006 | 7:40 a.m.

I stood near the new South Coast project, admiring the sleek lines of its architecture and thinking about the ways such developments seed a different future than previous generations of urban Americans ever envisioned. It promises a future that we see all over the Las Vegas Valley, one that is already common across the nation, but also can be seen in crystal-clear high relief here.

Cities of the Industrial Age had vital core areas that drove their economies. They had magnificent public and private buildings, museums like the Museum of Modern Art in New York or the Field Museum in Chicago, to attest to their prominence. Huge factories and office buildings clustered around these magnificent edifices. Often you could smell the industry as you walked into the museum or the performing arts center; but all understood that the smell was that of prosperity, of wealth, of local success.

Las Vegas was different. We never had that kind of center. Our "downtown" was where the train stopped, a creation of the land auction that we celebrated the 100th anniversary of last year. More reminiscent of American towns than cities, it was only barely a downtown, a captive of the changing ways Americans moved. When we traveled by train, that was our center.

When we first traveled by car, the Strip became our downtown. It was different than most American downtowns, where you could shoot off a cannon after 5 p.m. and never hit anybody. For a long time, locals used the Strip as their playground. In those long-lost halcyon days, there was a shoulder season here; we actually got the town back from its visitors once in a while. And then we knowingly played in their playground.

The great growth spurt that began in the late 1980s and continues to this day did something remarkable: it destroyed whatever core of a city we had and made us into many cities. It is not only Boulder City, North Las Vegas, Henderson and the city of Las Vegas, the formal jurisdictions besides Clark County in the valley. We have further devolved into neighborhood-based communities like the South Coast that perfectly illustrate the future.

Essentially, the physical center here did not hold. Las Vegas once meant the area on both sides of Interstate 15 from downtown to roughly Tropicana. Beyond that was way out there. That community had institutions that served it, clubs and bowling alleys, restaurants and libraries, churches and synagogues. But the constant pressure of more newcomers every year taxed those institutions, for the demand upon them was far greater than they had been designed to bear.

The result was the fracturing of one "city" into many. Everywhere you see a Station or Coast casino, you have a small city that revolves around the hotel-casino-movie theaters-restaurants at its core. Sam's Town was the first; the nine primary Station properties all qualify as community centers, as do five of the Boyd-Coast properties. That is at least 14 cities in the valley.

Two changes contributed to this new reality. The institutions of the pre-1985 Las Vegas Valley were not strong enough to withstand the growth. The neighborhood casinos stepped into the vacuum, offering all the features anyone could want. It became natural to seek in private space what had once been the province of downtown: a movie, a stroll afterward with an ice cream cone, and with the added advantage that you could play a few slots if you chose.

The people who came to the new suburbs were different than the people who had been here before. In 1980 almost everyone who was retired here had lived their working life in the valley. That is so far from true today that it defies comprehension. Retirees come here from all over the country, outnumbering local retirees by an exponential ratio. The newcomers lacked any ties to the region and the all-in-one experience of the casino/entertainment center was appealing. Instead of driving from strip mall to strip mall, they could have it all at one stop.

Such people have no ties to downtown Las Vegas or even the Strip. They live in their neighborhood, defined not by municipality or income bracket, but by where they go for dinner and fun on Saturday night. They have created many cities out of the one we once were, replacing community-wide institutions with neighborhood ones. Casinos, malls and airports became the same places awhile ago; people have embraced this vision of life here. The urban future is already here.