Las Vegans’ voices cry out: Build a community

By Joe Schoenmann (contact)

Tuesday, March 25, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Heather MacIntosh sits at the end of a long table in a dark downtown Las Vegas lounge as 12 people introduce themselves and their causes.

Taking copious notes in minuscule, perfect script, she hears about the Huntridge Theatre, the “Mob Museum,” the Fifth Street School, the need for places where children can play and dance.

After one especially loud introduction, one of the 12 interrupts. He didn’t expect this many people to show up to talk to MacIntosh, his worry being that too much information will muddy the message. That is, that there’s more to Las Vegas residents and their community than the casinos and foreclosures and entertainment and scandals that make national news.

MacIntosh listens seriously, nodding. Later she admits to being somewhat stunned.

Not because there were too many messages. But because all these people care so passionately about issues and concerns that, truth be told, she wasn’t really sure were the kinds of things people in Las Vegas really cared about.

“I wasn’t worried, but I will say I was relieved when I kept getting these calls and e-mails from the Las Vegas community who were excited about us coming out,” says MacIntosh, the 37-year-old president of Preservation Action, an advocacy group that promotes historic preservation.

MacIntosh is well-versed in history, with two masters, one in art history from Williams College, the other in the history of architecture from the University of Virginia. Before moving to Washington, D.C., she was the preservation advocate for Historic Seattle, a preservation group, and prior to that, served as deputy director of HistoryLink, the nation’s first online history encyclopedia, according to Preservation Action’s Web site.

A story in last Monday’s Sun telling of her Las Vegas arrival the next day led to a barrage of phone calls and e-mails to her office in Washington.

“Just the questions they were asking upfront suggested that there was a good core understanding to build on,” she said.

After her meeting with residents, she met Wednesday with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in his Las Vegas office. On Thursday she attended Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman’s weekly news conference and toured the Neon Museum and the city’s developing Mob Museum. She wrapped up her trip Friday with lunch with former Lt. Gov. Lonnie Hammargren.

Her four-day trip to Las Vegas was a sort of reverse lobbying effort. Instead of waiting for those who might need her help to come to her office, she is going to various cities this year for the first time to collect information about what people throughout America want in terms of historic preservation.

Born in North Carolina, she said the East Coast has little knowledge about Las Vegas in terms of its history or cultural value. And although the West is well-represented in Congress, “D.C. preservation thinking is very East Coast-centric,” she said.

“It seemed very important to understand what is going on in Las Vegas and use Las Vegas as a test case on how to effectively listen and understand how we might better serve the West,” she said.

More than the coastal West, Las Vegas is young, having celebrated its 100th year in 2005.

With that in mind, is there really anything here worth preserving? It often doesn’t seem that way, what with the celebration that goes into the demolition of Strip properties.

MacIntosh barely paused when asked the question.

“A number of people travel Europe and come to the United States and don’t think we should be preserving anything, because relative to that, it looks like nothing,” she said. “But you have a town like Las Vegas, 100 years old, and it’s relative to that time frame.”

She called a movement in Las Vegas to preserve midcentury modern structures, spearheaded by a group called the Atomic Age Alliance — which is working to save UNLV’s Maude Frazier Hall from the wrecking ball — a “good fit.”

“Some of these buildings are blocky and have a very ‘Brady’ look to them that can be dismissed,” MacIntosh said. “But as people like those around this table tonight start talking about them, about their meaning at the time, they tie in the community and more people want to start saving them.”

“Community” is a word that came up over and over with those around the table.

Judy Dixon Gabaldon, co-author of the book “Las Vegas: The Fabulous First Century,” grew up an “Air Force brat,” moving from military base to military base with her family. But all her life she had a yearning to be in Las Vegas.

“For whatever reason, I have this strong identity with Las Vegas,” she said. “I’ve lived here since 1994, but feel like I’ve been here my whole life. And I hate to see everything turned into the supermodern that has nothing to do with the old Las Vegas.”

“The world’s changed and people need community,” added Pam Hartley, a self-described neighborhood activist.

After the 12 people left, MacIntosh described the meeting as powerful and “exciting.”

The conceptual leap she witnessed Tuesday night was this: “They were looking at it as a problem to be solved, not as buildings to be saved. That’s a huge difference and one that I don’t think would have happened in the 1970s.”

With promises to stay in touch and possibly become members of Preservation Action, the energetic group departed. Then MacIntosh walked to her downtown hotel beneath the Lite-Brite canopy of the Fremont Street Experience, images of poker chips and cards and red-lipped women dancing overhead.