Biggest Vegas Stories of 2011: A Year End, Traffic Baiting List

We're nearly two weeks into the new year... and since we're deep into the January doldrums, blogs, magazines, newspapers, and new aggregation sites are still putting together best of 2011 lists in shameless attempts to grab some extra traffic. And since I am by no means above shameless stunts, here's my list of the top Las Vegas stories in 2011:


The Cosmopolitan Opens for Business

The Cosmo opened at the tail end of 2010, technically, but really 2011 was the first year that the mega-expensive, mid-Strip property had to shine. The resort was designed to attract an all new demographic to Las Vegas, which the powers that be described as the "curious class." Many were confused by exactly what the demo was supposed to be, but the term basically translated to the rich young LA  elite looking for something a little different... essentially the people who party at The Standard Hotel locations in Downtown LA or on The Sunset Strip. And it worked, in a way... the rooms at The Cosmo are quite often filled with young partygoers, and the sexy Chandelier Bar has become one of the hippest new watering holes in town. The resort has done a good job of booking hip indie rockers, from all time icons like Morrissey (headlining in the main theater) to up and coming buzz bands like Best Coast and Fitz and the Tantrums (rocking out on the more intimate Book and Stage) played the resort last year, while a slew of Pitchfork approved acts like The Shins, Justice, The Rapture, and Foster the People are on the books to perform there in upcoming months. The Cosmo also has one of the hottest nightclubs in town, The Marquee, which ushered in the beginning of 2011 with performances by Jay Z and Coldplay. While all of this may make The Cosmo sound like a runaway success, The Resort is actually losing money because gambling revenues are not strong... and despite all of The Cosmo's outside the box thinking, the Vegas economy is still fueled by gambling. Which puts the owners of The Cosmo in the awkward position of successfully attracting a new demographic to Las Vegas... only to find out that the "Curious Class" isn't all that curious about the thing that most defines Las Vegas.


Downtown Draws the Hipster Elite
Downtown Las Vegas is not as cool as Austin, Portland, Silverlake, or Williamsburg (Williamsburg is dead anyway at this point, but that's another story), but the neighborhood is becoming more and more of a hipster enclave... which is a pretty amazing development, considering that Vegas was built on glittering consumer palaces. But indie alty artsty types have found a home in Sin City around Fremont Street, where some of the coolest bars in town are located, from The Griffin (a super chill hipster hang with a great jukebox) to Frankie's Tiki Room (kitschy old fashioned fun) to The Beauty Bar (the hipster dance party center of Vegas) to Insert Coins (a video game lounge designed for discerning geeks). The ever expanding arts and music First Fridays events take place all over Downtown and has become a mandatory event for the artsiest Vegas citizens, while the best food trucks in town often post up near Fremont Street. Downtown has been growing in hipster cred for years, but 2011 was the year when Downtown cohered into a formidable mecca for indie scene dwellers... even if its in the shadow of the super mainstream Vegas Strip.



The Economy Continues to Pound Sin City
This is the inescapable fact of Las Vegas these days. While the economy as a whole seems to be on the (very slow) mend, Vegas has been hit hard and 2011 was no better. Before the economy crashed in 2008, there seemed to be no end in sight for the Las Vegas bubble, as more and more multi-billion dollar mega-resorts were replacing classic casinos, and no matter how many new rooms became available in new hotels, the town was almost always at capacity. Expensive restaurants were overbooked and girls in too shirt-skirts waited in long lines outside even the lamest clubs. People were gambling their money away and the rest of the city beyond the tourist mecca area was expanding quickly as more and more people started to move to the quickly growing metropolis. But then everything crashed like a house of cards, or at least like a hacky metaphor. Construction halted on many of those aforementioned multi-billion dollar mega resorts, as giant empty lots sit where proud old Rat Pack era haunts once stood. The Cosmo did open, but only after a European bank took over its staggering debt. Hotel prices swing wildly from weekend to weekend, as resorts are often desperate to attract visitors (you can stay at The Wynn for about $100 a night if you book the right weekend, an astoundingly low rate for such a luxurious and expensive boutique hotel) and shows from iconic entertainers and restaurants from celebrity chefs were forced to shutter. The Strip itself feels strangely empty on many Saturday nights, as the bustling crowds of the midd 00's have thinned drastically. All is not lost in Vegas as the economy slowly recovers and the smartest Casino bosses will continue to innovate and succeed with the cards they've been dealt, but for now some of the glamor of the halcyon days of Sin City feels strangely absent. But Vegas is a town famous for reinventing itself every decade (remember that the 90's were all about trying to attract families and turn Vegas into Disneyland with gambling and liberal open container laws before things shifted to the more honest and direct "What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas" philosophy that launched a decade defined by the kind of debauchery and bad behavior celebrated in The Hangover), so maybe 2012 will be the year Vegas is reborn again, like a glorious Phoenix rising from the ashes.

Or the world will end. Either way. 

Stardust Memories

On November 1, 2006, a gambler from Hawaii cast the last die at The Stardust Resort, which had been operating continuously since July 2, 1958. As guests filed out for the last time, John Lennon's Nobody Told Me played out of the resort's speakers (a nice and surprisingly unsentimental choice, I have to say). Less than a year later, the classic casino was destroyed in a controlled implosion in order to make way for the latest mega-resort, The Echelon Place.


An ambitious project that rivaled CityCenter in the scope of its vision, Echelon Place was budgeted at upwards of $4 billion and was set to  feature four hotels that would add nearly 6,000 new rooms to a city that already hosted more hotel rooms (by far) than any other city on the planet, along with 25 restaurants and bars, a 750,000 square foot convention center, a 400,000 square foot shopping promenade and a 140,000 square foot casino; these, of course, are all things that Vegas was sorely lacking.

While Echelon Place was scheduled to open its shimmering new doors last year, construction was halted in 2008 due to the collapse of the U.S. economy, and there is no sign that the project will resume anytime soon.

The site of the ambitious project is now nothing but an 87 acre hole in the ground, with half built towers standing empty and exposed in a pre-apocalyptic wasteland. The massive lot has been untouched by workers for nearly three full years; because of that, the demolition of the beloved Stardust seems even more pointless than it did five years ago.

Before it was demolished, The Stardust was one of the last of the classic, old-Vegas casinos, a slightly seedy echo of Sin City's extremely seedy past. This was a place that was once run by mobsters whose stories were told in Martin Scorsese's Casino. Singer Billy Daniels pioneered the long-term residency model that big name performers enjoy to this day in town. Siegfried and Roy got their first Strip show at The Stardust before becoming Vegas icons. Wayne Newton and George Carlin both had long-term residencies on the property.



Until it closed, the air in place was thick with old-time Vegas atmosphere. The dealers had that attitude as if they'd partied with Sinatra and were unimpressed by the smug frat bros wearing too much Axe-body spray and ditzy sorority girls that look like baby-hookers stumbling out of nightclubs. I remember one magical night half a decade ago, sitting at a video poker machine and sipping on comped and very strong Jack and Cokes with my girlfriend at the time as the bartender told us story after story about the fabled resort.

And now? The place is gone, and it's been replaced by... nothing. But even if the Echelon Place had opened, it would have surely been just another gleaming palace dedicated to commerce and corporate slickness, a place that would have been shiny, new, modern, hip, of the moment... and utterly lacking in character and history. No doubt a trendy chef or two would have opened a restaurant with a chic Eurotrash name and a mega-club would have been placed in the spot spot where I once drank with a guy who had been working in the same place for five decades and told me stories of seeing stars like Bogart, Beatty and Sinatra hold their liquor the way real men are supposed to.

Is there a lesson or a metaphor to take out of this? I'm not really sure. I just know that the old-school Vegas, the Vegas that Frank Sinatra and Elvis and Bugsy Segal would recognize, is a rare, endangered, dying thing. The business of Vegas is bigger than ever but becoming more and more corporate, increasingly uniform and lacking in character. Maybe I'm just feeling nostalgic for a time I didn't actually live and haunted by an era I only know through a hazy pop cultural lens (a symptom of my generation and one that is not helped by Mad Men), but I feel that what happened to The Stardust is just another example of how Vegas devalues its history even more than Los Angeles (if that's possible) and in its relentless quest to stay fresh, everything is starting to feel stale.

Look at the recent redesign at The Tropicana. The Trop is another one of the old classic resorts left standing, but they recently renovated the entire place. While renovation is preferable to demolition and the new rooms might in fact be quite nice, much of what made the place so charming and wonderful has been gone forever. The old-fashioned Italian restaurant that had a quiet, semi-secret lounge with  red leather chairs and bitingly strong cocktails is gone, replaced by slick and new facilities (though I'll give the designers of the "new and improved" Trop big props for at least keeping the funky old window ceiling above the main casino floor).

A hole sits silently where The Stardust once shined, but even if the latest and greatest mega-resort had opened in its place, there would still be metaphoric hole on The Strip, a smoking crater echoing with the ghosts of Sin City's wild, untamed past.