The Strip Is Back!

My stomach hurts. It’s 7 A.M., and somehow person after person after person has persuaded me to pull an all-nighter so they can show me their little slice of Vegas–their glossy strip club, their late-night pool-cabana scene, their Studio 54, their swank ultralounge. And now, at an after-hours nightclub, the bass pumping, my eyes jolted open every few seconds by the shock of manufactured cleavage, they are offering me a beer. Not even a light beer. All I wanted was to see a nice Cirque du Soleil show, work my expense account at Le Cirque with my only famous friend, Robert Goulet, and crash at the new hotel at Mandalay Bay, where my standard room has two bathrooms and three flat-screen TVs. But New Vegas won’t let me be. It needs to show me what a great time it’s having, with its supersized, sanitized, non-intimidating version of the same sins I don’t want when I’m at home. I am deeply considering taking the beer so I can finally get sick and get the nurse to send me home.

This New Vegas, this stomach-churning Vegas, was built from a scrap heap of roller coasters. When gambling popped up at every racetrack and lottery counter and on every riverboat and square foot where a

Native American once lived, Las Vegas had an identity crisis. It built theme parks, believing that if its vices had become acceptable, it might as well be a peddler of family-friendly activities. And it stumbled. Because what Vegas hadn’t understood is that, compared with even the most worn-out vices, like keno and showgirls, roller coasters bite. So now Vegas has reinvented itself again, returning to vice but sanitizing it by creating the biggest, nicest place to sin ever imagined, a Sodom and Gomorrah without the guilt. People come to Vegas not to do what they can’t do at home but to do it bigger and brassier. The town’s logo, “What happens here, stays here,” is complete camp. What happens in Vegas, in fact, is bragged about at home for months afterward.

All this feels strange, but not nearly as strange as talking to Robert Goulet about it, especially on three hours of sleep. “You beggar, it’s not Sin City,” he says. “It’s Fun City.” He has a point. It’s a Vegas where the average tourist gambles only four hours in his four-day stay. That’s fine with the casinos, since today they make more on rooms, drinks, food, shopping and entertainment–the stuff they used to give away to get you to gamble.

Vegas doesn’t have to give anything away right now. It’s so hot, even the people who own the town are spending money here. Last month, 87-year-old multibillionaire Kirk Kerkorian cut a deal to merge his MGM Mirage with Mandalay Resort Group to form the world’s largest gaming company–until last week, when Harrah’s Entertainment agreed to buy Caesars Entertainment in a $9.25 billion deal (including cash, stock and debt) that would create an even bigger company. Sheldon Adelson, the 70-year-old owner of the Venetian, is contemplating an IPO to score some cash to make a bigger bet on a new Strip hotel, the Palazzo, and other properties in the U.S. and overseas. In April, Steve Wynn, 62, the man who brought renewed glamour to Vegas in the 1990s with the shimmering-sided Mirage and then the Continental swank of the Bellagio, will open the $2.6 billion Wynn Las Vegas. It’s just a construction site, but Wynn’s creation is scaring all his competitors, with its plans for a 15-story mountain and lake, 2,700 suites-only rooms, a Ferrari and Maserati dealership, in-house staging of the Tony-winning Avenue Q and the only 18-hole golf course on the Strip.

In an economic experiment worthy of study at Harvard Business School, sex has proved to be far more profitable than wholesome fun. The MGM Grand tore down its amusement park and now houses two nightclubs (a third is opening soon) and a replica of Paris’ Crazy Horse, La Femme, in which the dancers’ costumes consist of a stringless G-string, one of many great new technologies to come from Las Vegas. At the Mandalay Bay, the House of Blues’ new lounge has a Friday party for swingers. The hotel has a pool called the Moorea Beach Club where European-style bathing is encouraged. Some dealers at the Rio wear thong bikinis at night, and the Hard Rock has blackjack in the pool. The newest Cirque du Soleil show at New York-New York Hotel & Casino, called Zumanity, is a virtually naked gymnastics event in which men make out and the rest of the cast simulates acrobatic sex. “I had the vision of some couple seeing one of the acts and suing us after trying to replicate it and hurting his back,” says Michael Bolingbroke, senior vice president of Cirque du Soleil. Treasure Island, trying to shed its wholesome image, now calls itself TI and has replaced its kid-friendly outdoor pirate show with one in which half-naked sirens say things like “Ahoy? Who you calling a hoy?”

The sexification has helped put Vegas on pace for a record year in visitors, after having 35.5 million last year. In the second quarter, revenue per available room in top hotels along the Strip rose to $190 a day, according to Joseph Greff of Fulcrum Global Partners. Room rates are up 40% from the same period last year, but the increase didn’t stop occupancy from zooming to 95%. The city’s casinos, hotels, restaurants, shops and clubs took in a record $32.8 billion in 2003. Vegas is the fastest-growing major U.S. city; 7,000 people move to Clark County each month, bulging the population to 1.6 million and overstretching the police, fire fighters, hospitals and schools. The unemployment rate is more than a third below the national average, and there’s more construction than in any other city in the U.S. It’s the country’s top tourist and convention spot, with Vegas taking in more money from conventions ($6.5 billion) than gambling ($6.1 billion).

By granting outposts to chefs such as Emeril Lagasse, Thomas Keller, Alain Ducasse, Charlie Palmer, Wolfgang Puck and Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Vegas dining has become so high-end it employs more master sommeliers than any other U.S. city. The hotels only get more and more extravagant and opulent. One of the must-have features is a posh spa: every Strip hotel has one, such as the 69,000-sq.-ft. Canyon Ranch SpaClub at the Venetian, which has a two-story rock-climbing wall. Luxury designer shops, from Louis Vuitton and Gucci to Armani and Dior, are so common that they seem practically like Gaps in Vegas. Just down the Strip from the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum, which is inside the Venetian, the Bellagio houses another impressive gallery, which showcases works from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. There is even a push to move the Montreal Expos to town. Real estate companies are racing to Manhattanize the place by building high-rise condos in the middle of vast, cheap desert.

A good chunk of this growth is driven by people under 30, the ones who can spend money until at least 7 a.m., apparently with no significant stomach problems. Peter Morton, 56, the first to see that youth was an untapped market, in 1995 built the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in the middle of the sagebrush off the Strip. “It was totally intuitive,” he says. That demo is funding the Richard Meier–designed tower he’s building later this year. “Our demographics studies have shown that young people who come to Vegas are better educated, have more disposable income and are less averse to travel than the typical Vegas customer. Our dealers earn more in tips than any other dealers in Vegas.” The hotel has a Sunday daytime pool party called Rehab, a Mexican restaurant called the Pink Taco and live webcams at the pool for its website. (What happens in Vegas goes right up on the Internet–the way everyone likes it.) The penthouse contains the giant Boom-Boom Room, which has a bowling alley, sauna and–like seemingly every party bus, large hotel suite and open flat space in town–a stripper pole. Las Vegas is on orange alert as far as emergency stripping preparation is concerned.

The Hard Rock’s Saturday night comedy show, Beacher’s Madhouse, is less about jokes than celebrity spotting, audience flashing, contortionists, midgets, monkeys and Jackass-style stunts. “People come to Vegas to release,” says Jeffrey Beacher, a comedian who went unnoticed in New York City and now headlines a show it’s impossible to get tickets to.

Following Morton’s lead, the owners of Palms Casino Resort, which opened at the end of 2001, decided to aim even younger. The Maloof brothers, who own the Sacramento Kings basketball team, sold their local casino and built the Palms off-Strip and gave it no particular theme, figuring Vegas visitors would find out which hotel fit their demographic. (Wynn will also be unthemed, as will the Palazzo. The MGM Grand and the Mandalay Bay have almost entirely shed their film and Asian themes.) “I wanted to build the ultimate party place,” says George Maloof, 40, the brother who runs the hotel. “I wanted to make sure I cultivated young Hollywood. In the ’70s, ’80s and most of the ’90s, Hollywood didn’t really come to Las Vegas except for a big fight. Now it’s every weekend.”

The problem with being a full-time host, Maloof has discovered, is that you have to be approachable. As teams of strippers practice water volleyball for the upcoming $10,000 tournament, women in mermaid tails splash in a tank behind him and go-go dancers cut loose inside a giant clear balloon at the poolside bar, Maloof is approached by a parade of personalities: a guy who wants him to invest in a pizza restaurant; a middle-aged Arab who wants to be reimbursed for part of the $10,000 he just lost in blackjack; a singer who wants Maloof to hear his act; a scary-looking guy who needs to borrow $500 for 24 hours. Not only does the guy not pay him back the next day but he also pops up on FOX’s The Casino the following week. His name is Ernie, and he got kicked out of the Golden Nugget after convincing a young blond to work with him entertaining a high roller. Everybody in Vegas, Maloof explains, is looking out for only themselves. “You can’t have a real relationship here,” he says. “Not just romantically,” he says. “The only people I trust are my brothers.”

Maloof made the Palms–whose casino floor is full of the older locals who played in his previous hotel–into a hipster draw by housing the 2002 MTV’s Real World inside a suite in the hotel, a risky move the rest of Vegas thought was suicide (having cameras inside a hotel was believed to be like asking the gaming commission to shut you down). But the Real World scheme worked better than expected. It made the hotel and its steak house, nightclubs and tattoo parlor the hottest spots for the barely legal. It is Britney Spears’ home away from home whenever she’s in town to get married. “I have friends of friends who are 17 years old, and they can’t wait to go to Vegas,” says Maloof. “The trust-fund babies will do anything they can do to go to our clubs.”

With the Palms’ success, the once secretive Vegas is courting the media. The Golden Nugget is the focus of The Casino; the Discovery Channel’s American Casino follows the Green Valley Ranch hotel; Extra has regular Vegas segments. Vegas even has its own impressively attended comedy and film festivals. “The whole entertainment industry is looking to Las Vegas,” says Trevor Groth, the director of programming of CineVegas, who persuaded Jack Nicholson, Sean Penn and Dennis Hopper to show up for last month’s sixth annual festival. “It’s a suburb of Los Angeles now.”

The young people of New Vegas mostly come from L.A., and they spend most of their time at the clubs, which have sprung up in the desert like stripper poles. Every hotel has at least one disco and an ultralounge, the Vegas term for a Eurotrash bar with overpriced drinks. The clubs are a big draw for women, who outnumber the men. “We give women some empowerment. Let them dance on a table and feel like a star for a minute,” says Jennifer Worthington, 32, who co-owns Coyote Ugly, BiKiNiS and Tangerine. “You have people coming from all over the country who, if they went to New York, wouldn’t feel comfortable going to a club [like this], but here they’ll do it. We give them a safe, contained environment to act out their own fantasies.”

At 4:30 a.m. on a Tuesday, not long before my stomach gives out, MGM’s Tabu still has men dancing competitively on tabletops to impress women, like some ’80s John Travolta movie someone forgot to make. “The clubs are now carrying Vegas,” says Cy Waits, the bar’s VIP manager. “The casinos want us to bring in quality. Young people are more reckless with their money.” Along with clubs, arenas and music venues have sprouted up in the hotels, replacing the crooners with major pop and hip-hop acts. “For years people thought it was where acts go to retire,” says Russell Jones, general manager of House of Blues Las Vegas, where Prince, Snoop Dogg and James Brown have played this year. “That image has really changed. Now a lot of the acts come through three times a year.”

The only part of the action that casinos don’t control are the strip clubs, and they’re trying to change that. Last year, a few hotel-casino owners quietly started a conversation about getting the gaming commission to allow them to put in strip joints. It didn’t go well. So for now, they’re compromising with burlesque, which is the kind of stripping Janet Jackson was supposed to do. Burlesque dancers do shows at Tangerine at TI, which opened over the July 4 weekend, and 40 Deuce, which opens at the Mandalay Bay this fall.

But most of Vegas agrees that the casinos will eventually find a way to bring the strip clubs inside. “It’s guaranteed. It’s just a matter of when,” says Las Vegas mayor Oscar Goodman, 64, whose municipal duties cover just a a small part of town north of the Strip called Glitter Gulch, a technicality that does not stop him from representing everyone anywhere near Vegas. A former defense attorney for alleged mobsters, Goodman was voted in for a second term by 86% of the voters and can’t believe the other 14% actually exist. In his office are a truly shocking number of different Oscar Goodman bobble-head dolls, and his walls are lined with photos in which he posed with celebrities. He has taken down one with Michael Jackson, but he can’t help but show me anyway. Goodman makes me watch a tape of a Tonight Show segment he appears on, and he laughs throughout the piece. Before I leave, he gives me a poker chip with his face on it.

Goodman, a spokesman for Bombay Sapphire Gin, which sponsors monthly “martinis with the mayor” events, is a proponent of allowing strippers in the casinos as well as expanding legalized prostitution, now allowed in certain parts of Nevada. “We’re the fastest-growing everything,” the mayor says in his office, flipping through the endless escort section of the phone book. “We may as well be the fastest-growing escort service.” His city is growing so quickly that an Internal Revenue Service building is being constructed downtown right near his office. “We’ll be able to tax the IRS,” he says, “which is my dream come true as a former criminal-defense lawyer.”

In a struggle replicated in most families, Vegas is changing faster than the older, more conservative gaming-control board wants. Two billboards that the Hard Rock put up this year–one had a naked woman lying on a blackjack table with a card in her mouth above the line THERE’S ALWAYS A TEMPTATION TO CHEAT–were yanked by the board. The casino agreed to pay $300,000 to settle a complaint that claimed the Hard Rock’s ads had damaged the state’s image. This, remember, is a state where some cities have legal whorehouses.

And yet there are so many strip clubs in Vegas that many of the dancers commute from other cities. They are such a part of the Vegas mainstream that high-end strip joints often have tables not only of couples but also groups of women. Japanese tour buses stop midday at the Palomino Club so the riders can check off a requisite Vegas experience. The Spearmint Rhino Gentleman’s Club, which has a clothing boutique where men can buy outfits for their favorite performers, employs a host, Rico Connor, who liaisons with casino hosts to help them entertain their high rollers. Strip clubs are so institutionalized that an FBI sting to find Mafia connections instead discovered that two clubs were funding the campaigns of local politicians in exchange for their pushing laws to make it difficult for new clubs to open.

Sapphire, billed as the world’s largest strip club at a cavernous 71,000 sq. ft., opened two years ago with a party attended by Rachel Hunter, Carmen Electra, Dave Navarro and Tommy Lee. It used to be a mega-gym with a regulation basketball court until the owners decided to turn it into a club. “In real estate, the land goes to the highest and best use,” explains co-owner Peter Feinstein. Now instead of collecting gym fees, he charges women $60 to $100 a night to sell $20 lap dances, along with the more profitable revenue stream from drinks and a $5 ATM fee that almost makes usury a sin again. He does not, however, get the $20 entrance fee nonlocals pay at the door; that goes right to the back of the casino to the taxi driver who dropped his riders off at the front, as it does in all Vegas strip clubs. Driving a cab in Vegas has become less about ferrying passengers than strip-club promotion.

Pointing out the group of couples coming inside, Feinstein says, “Basically, this is an R-rated nightclub.” I decide to give it a shot. I start talking to a table of Orange County, Calif., elementary-school teachers, all female, who have brought a friend to take her mind off her divorce. The conversation is going well, as I find out that this is the first strip club most of them have ever been to, and they find out that I’m married and have never kissed anyone else since meeting my wife. For a guy alone at a strip club, I am coming off like Alan Alda.

In a show of gentlemanliness, I offer to help the slightly uncomfortable teachers secure a lap dance for the divorce. In a slight downgrade of my gentlemanliness, I never return to the women, instead using my awesome reporter’s notebook ($2.99; any drugstore) to talk to a stripper for the next two hours. “To someone from Minnesota we’re sluts, but in Vegas this is a respectable job to the locals,” says Sami, 33, who is known as the Fire Bitch because of her ability to light on fire a surprising number of her body parts. Sami says she’s not that good at the gig, except for the fire part, because she’s too straight-talking to give the guys the doting, ego-stroking GFE–girlfriend experience–for which they spend the big money. Sami doesn’t drink, likes dogs a lot and just bought a really nice house. Toward the end of our chat, she lets me touch her breast to feel the implant. I cannot figure out if this is an intimate form of bonding or just a Vegas handshake.

The new Vegas has upped not only the sex but the violence as well. Boxing has been outdrawn by the Ultimate Fighting Championship (U.F.C.), a chain-link-caged, rule-free (unless you count “no biting, no eye-gouging”), bare-knuckle competition so bloody it once was decried by Senator John McCain and the American Medical Association, banned by New York State and dropped by pay-per-view cable. Match results are covered by the Las Vegas Review Journal’s sports pages. At a bout last month, audience members included Shaquille O’Neal (who the owners say once asked them to change the date of a fight because he had a game), Juliette Lewis, Cindy Crawford and her husband, Rande Gerber. The sport, which seems to involve a lot of submission holds and smeared blood, may surpass both frat-house hazing and Mel Gibson films as the world’s most homoerotic event. And while the hooting crowd is clearly loving it, my front-row seats are reminding me just how weak my stomach is.

The U.F.C. was bought and revamped in 2001 by second-generation Vegas tycoons Lorenzo, 35, and Frank Fertitta III, 42, brothers and co-owners of Station Casinos, who in their spare time practice Brazilian jujitsu, the technique of choice among top U.F.C. fighters. In fact, a series of buttons on the U.F.C. video game will allow you to fight as Lorenzo, who apparently is much stronger than he looks. Their parents gave them a bunch of local casinos, which, along with revenue made from consulting with Native Americans on casino operations, they have used to build the slick Green Valley Ranch Resort & Spa, a hotel about 15 minutes from the Strip that is the choice for celebrities who are too cool for the crowds. As in the Palms, the casino–which is on a different floor from the lobby and contains a food court–is for local regulars and the rooms are for tourist regulars. The Fertittas are building an even nicer hotel called Red Rock Station Resort and Casino, which they say will flood natural light into the casino. “It’s way too competitive for that old-style casino of no bathrooms in restaurants and no TVs in the rooms,” says Lorenzo, referring to layouts designed to send customers to the gaming areas. “Bring people here, give them a good time and make things convenient, and they’ll gamble on their own time.”

The weirdest part of Vegas, with all its clean bawdiness, is that for a tourist town, it looks as if it might be developing a real urban center, where people not only party but meet, live and perhaps form the kind of community Vegas has never had–one in which people no longer change their cell-phone numbers every six months to escape from attachments, debts and exes. Real estate companies are racing to put up 20-story condo towers near the Strip. “People want to own a piece of Vegas,” says Jeff Soffer, 36, principal owner of Miami-based Turnberry Associates, which is building condominium towers at the MGM Grand. The company had estimated it would take two years to sell the apartments in the first MGM tower. It took three months.

Retirees and people with a second home like the condos because they are easy to maintain, but a surprising number of locals buy apartments so they can be close to what Mayor Goodman calls, without irony, the intellectual center of Vegas. That center is being defined, in true American fashion, not by an ocean or an island but by a stretch of highway. “That’s the view,” says Lorenzo Fertitta from the presidential suite at the Green Valley Ranch. “The Strip is the beach and the water.”

“We’re going through the reverse of what so many cities have suffered through, this flight out of the city,” says Jim Murren, the president and CFO of MGM Mirage and a longtime Vegas resident. The city last week unveiled its own public transportation system, a $650 million, privately funded monorail that, for $3 a ride, runs the 4-mile stretch from the convention center up the Strip to the MGM Grand, and someday is supposed to connect all the way from the airport to downtown. Turnberry and CENTRA Properties plan to build a 1.2 million-sq.-ft. outdoor mall near the Mandalay Bay, which will further the invasion of stores such as Saks, Macy’s, Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom, now housed at the Fashion Show mall, which is close to finishing a $1 billion renovation. And downtown is building a giant furniture showroom that hopes to steal business from San Francisco and maybe even North Carolina. Mayor Goodman hopes that in the future people will think of Vegas for gambling, sex and furniture.

It’s conceivable that in a few decades, Vegas will have completely shed its shame and its kitsch, that it will be a multidimensional one-industry town like Los Angeles, only more urban and with better food. Already the young and old come to Vegas without irony, and its widely copied faux architecture and grand showmanship are thought of around the globe as simply American. If New Vegas foretells something about America’s future,then the culture wars are all but over, and culture lost. The only thing I miss about it is that culture went to bed at a decent hour. –With reporting by Laura A. Locke/Las Vegas