Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

The Las Vegas story finally gets a fitting home at Nevada State Museum

Nevada State Museum

Iris Dumuk

The Nevada State Museum, in its new home at the Springs Preserve. You. Must. Go. Now.

The Details

Nevada State Museum
Friday-Monday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m., $5-$19
Springs Preserve, 333 S. Valley View Blvd., 486-5205

So this little boy is telling his sister he wants to see the future, and she’s impatiently telling him he already saw the future. I hope he takes it as his cue to leave, because I want to see the future.

I must see the future. If it’s anything like the past, well, it’ll be nuts. I mean, who knew that when the water permanently ebbed 200 million years ago it would form a desert that would birth this weird little place that would grow disproportionately to its resources and draw international pilgrimages?

Add to that ruling mobsters who would be replaced by corporate giants building outlandish multibillion-dollar photo ops. There’s no story like this one and no state like Nevada.

The floor rumbles below us (for effect) in the geologic section, and the boy thunders down a carpeted ramp of the new $51.5 million Nevada State Museum. I move in to alternate between the past and future on the computer touchscreen before heading to another slick display that describes the Nevada landscape as a “complex mosaic” of the right soil, water and altitude for flora and fauna to thrive.

Presentation is everything, particularly when the battle for attention these days is cutthroat and staid history museums are deemed yawners. Now that the State Museum sits in its spacious new digs at the Springs Preserve, the presentation is worthy of the story (even if we did have to wait through all of its construction and opening delays).

Suddenly everyone seems as curious how plants conserve water as they are about discriminated-against Chinese railroad workers who settled into small Nevada towns. And how ’bout those showgirl costumes and walk-in, life-size cave? Atomic testing is a little more interesting, with the re-creation of an old, paneled office and looping video of a horrific mushroom cloud. There’s more, of course: trappers, traders, mapmakers, natives, fossils, skeletons, Howard Hughes (no relation to the fossils), Steve Wynn, Kirk Kerkorian, the Hoover Dam, segregation and even a mention of the unfortunate Donner Party.

Getting here wasn’t easy for the community that approved the 2001 bond issue for the new museum. There wasn’t enough to cover the increased construction costs, or even opening, leaving the gorgeous building sitting empty for two years until lawmakers approved additional funding to open it. And it’s not just for kids.

Our controversial adult industries—boxing, gaming and prostitution—aren’t completely ignored in the 13,000-square-foot exhibition space. Nor are the musicians and entertainers who gave Las Vegas its early fame, many of whom are paid tribute in old film footage.

Tiny Tim’s “God bless us, every one” comes to mind as I watch a random family at the dusk-in-the-desert display, where multiple large-scale video panels feature Nevada animals eating, nesting and doing what animals do, a montage that cycles in night skies with cacti in the foreground while we glance at an accompanying taxidermy display. Hallelujah.

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