Strip Silence

What happens when a city that has to keep moving suddenly stops?

Thursday, Oct. 9, 2008 | 11:27 a.m.

Yet, looking ahead, my calendar suddenly has a lot of empty squares. I blog for a national newspaper on the daily happenings in Vegas, and now entire days are passing where nothing is opening, being transformed, revamped, feted or benefited or in some way revving up enough to interest out-of-towners. This is unusual. But the brakes are being hit on a lot of change into the foreseeable future: Echelon is delayed; rumor is that the Elvis hotel is in trouble; and the remake of the Plaza where New Frontier once stood has not started. New nightclubs, high-end dining, unique shopping, all attended by TMZ-worthy celebs? Nothing opens at a construction site.

For the first time in years, the media crew that covers such events here in the land of perpetual change is covering stasis, and that won’t change soon.

This isn’t just about the plight of entertainment journalists. We’re merely the canaries in the gold mine. The fewer exciting changes we have to write about, the less the potential tourists elsewhere have to read about. It’s as simple as this: Does the outside world care about, say, events at UNLV? If you have a tourist economy like Vegas’, that is a question whose obvious answer matters to everyone.

That doesn’t mean people aren’t reading about Las Vegas, of course. For now, the story of arrogant Vegas on the verge of a fantastic belly flop has enough schadenfreude to please and grip a nation. It turns out people are as interested in closure or failure as they are in success. Perhaps even more so, based on the number of stories about Jay-Z’s 40/40 club shutting down and the Tropicana’s bankruptcy and a website briefly up that estimated how much Sheldon Adelson lost per minute from the dropping value of his stock in the Venetian and Palazzo’s parent company, Las Vegas Sands.

But ultimately it isn’t failure that will cause people to lose interest in Vegas—stagnation is the enemy: the same shows, the same shopping, the same restaurants and the same celebrities. Constant change remains the city’s best friend. We have nothing else to offer the world.

Past examples suggest this turbulent time will pass. From the Stratosphere to Planet Hollywood, resorts have a history of construction interruptions, financial issues and problems that finally get resolved, even if a lot of people lose a lot of money in the process. When you are an empty desert drawing more people than Mecca to see what wow factor humans can create, there must always be something new.

So someone will eventually buy the Tropicana; 40/40 is already a new sports book. A few problems have been sidestepped: A partnership with Dubai World has kept MGM’s CityCenter on schedule. As for the skeleton of Echelon, that too will eventually house a resort of some sort. Few showrooms or lots on the Strip stay empty for long.

But it might require revising our definition of “new.” Until now, it has always meant bigger, better. Maybe now it just means different: high-end Vegas yielding to the middle-class customers it once served, perhaps, or reaching for newly wealthy international customers. Either way, change is what will keep Vegas humming