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The significance of The Last Frontier casino in American history
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The significance of The Last Frontier casino in American history
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THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE LAST FRONTIER CASINO IN AMERICAN HISTORY by Cayetano Ferrer A Thesis Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF FINE ARTS August 2010 Copyright 2010 Cayetano Ferrer ii Table of Contents Abstract Introduction Introduction Endnotes The Last Frontier The Last Frontier Endnotes The New Frontier The New Frontier Endnotes The Frontier The Frontier Endnotes The New Frontier The New Frontier Endnotes Conclusion: The Great Unconformity Conclusion Endnotes Bibliography iii 1 8 9 18 19 29 30 37 38 43 44 46 47 iii Abstract Las Vegas is a city that was born out of the history of American expansion into the west, and like many western cities retains some residual traits of the frontier. But unlike the other cities of its size, it was built entirely after the frontier had been officially declared closed by the U.S. Census. The frontier ethos was manifested again in various ways here, most distinctly in the casinos fashioned after old west style gambling halls, but also in the development of military technology and new economic enterprise. As Las Vegas became the fastest growing city in the country, it also became the site of a new symbolic architecture that monumentalized the frontier, monuments that would eventually be demolished to make way for new development. 1 Introduction In the trajectory of aesthetic, civic and social tendencies, Las Vegas is the sited post‐script of the American frontier, a city founded on the powerful residual anxieties of westward expansion. Like Hollywood, Las Vegas is a socially produced pop mythology, drawing heavily on film genres such as the Western and Science Fiction, and came into American consciousness as the film studios declined. At the end of the Golden Age of Hollywood around 1948, the studio system broke down and so did the ability of this new medium to deal with the mythology of the frontier. In the migratory progression, civilization moved east again to recreate the frontier in a barren desert, with a rejuvenated relationship to space albeit filtered through Hollywood simulation. This conflicted relationship to materiality and time is manifested in its architecture, both in the strip of casinos and the enormous residential sprawl that surrounds it. Between the slightly unmatched seams of the loud carpet of the casino floors, we can find evidence of some of these anxieties being worked out. Underneath the mosaic of surfaces in the city there are materials that tell other stories: the frequently restructured cement foundations that diagram the city’s schizophrenic growth, the raw ore that brought the first mining operations and residents to Nevada and an unfathomable geological record dating back to the Precambrian era. Add to these layers the stray radiated dust particle from a decade of atomic testing nearby, a technology based on principles that question the notion of linear time 2 itself, and we arrive at a core sample of Las Vegas’ history. Designed around artifice and dominated by temporal shifts, the resounding indicators of a distant geological past and a contemporary urban present draws attention to the dislocated center, a cultural unconformity. 1 Las Vegas architecture constantly plays this game of locating the past, with references to a history from Egyptian pyramids to Roman palaces, medieval castles and finally the Western frontier, as if constantly asking itself how it arrived here through various configurations of stucco and faux finishing. In this thesis, a discussion about how a history of Western civilization gets imbued into the architectural symbolism of Las Vegas begins with an investigation into the way it portrayed its own recent past. This starts with the first themed casino, The Last Frontier, which had real pioneer artifacts on display within faux‐ rustic architecture. The Last Frontier was not only a major development in creating a Western‐themed experience in Las Vegas, but a landmark in the history of themed architecture itself. It was an architecture influenced by Hollywood set design, and as a part of a history of special effects it engages with the roots of the illusory experience, an aesthetic history that grew out of a complicated class negotiation of power and ideology. 2 In his book on this subject, Norman Klein writes “Special Effects were not simply a copy of the real; not even a copy of themselves. They were medicine where the doctor helps the patient fake her surgery. They were complicit.” 3 This thesis asks the question of what the “patient,” an ailing middle class, was looking to treat with the illusions of Las Vegas. And while there are many answers to this question, varying from tourist to locals and individual‐to‐individual, 3 the visual forms in the city and the stories behind them might lead to a composite picture of what is actually happening there, underneath the busy spectacle. One answer is that this building vernacular is tied to the problem of locating one’s position to history, and the need to relocate and revive the frontier in a place after the transition into Modernism. Whatever the sham‐surgery being performed, the recent economic failures in the city have disrupted the illusion that Las Vegas could remedy the maladies of the middle class, but rather a failed placebo. Crucial to tracing the shifting definition of the “frontier” is Frederick Jackson Turner’s seminal 1893 essay, The Significance of the Frontier in American History, which was the primary scholarship on the history of the frontier at the time of its writing. The essay was expanded into a book in 1921, in which Turner asserts that the frontier was at the core of American identity, and that the aggressive and resourceful tendencies required of people at the frontier was woven into the fabric of the entire nation at each stage of its development. It was in this shifting edge of the frontier that the character of this young country was formed, and his prediction was that the geographical limits of this expansion would leave Americans with an aggressive tendency, needing to be fulfilled in other ways. As the youngest city of its size in present‐day America, Las Vegas grew up with this shifting assessment of how and where it could expand, but expand it did, doubling its size every decade until 2007 when the growth ground to a halt. In a measure of synchronicity that has taken on a powerful symbolic resonance, this also happens to be the year that the Frontier Casino was imploded, crumbling amidst a crowd of cheering spectators. 4 The recent end to the rapid pace in which dreams were conjured and evaporated in Las Vegas offers a rare moment of a sustained observation. Certain salient features of recent American culture and economics can be located here, and the current financial lending crisis casts a detailed relief on the unsustainable speculation that drove real estate off the edge. Now, the largest developments in America sit empty or unfinished here, 4 like monuments to the failure of a succession of expansions that had already erased an earlier period of architecture through spectacular demolitions. As the city doubled in size between 1993‐2007 an average of one casino per year was imploded in an instant, usually celebrated with fireworks and fanfare. Drenched with symbolism, casino interiors can function like an all‐too‐ temporary museum exhibition featuring motifs that have latent connections to the aspirations and anxieties of a society at the period of their realization. Focusing on how an American anxiety regarding its lost frontier manifested as a city in the desert, this text will study Las Vegas’ “indigenous aesthetic” 5 as an interpretation of this recent history and the immediate landscape. Because an important feature of this aesthetic is the rise of themed architecture, a complicated relationship to site stemming from the simple act of naming places is revealed. The naming and subsequent renaming of the Last Frontier Casino is just one example of how the anxiety around locating the lost frontier represents a culture grasping to locate its reason for existence. 5 Symbolism in casino architecture was first articulated in a major way in the pivotal architectural study Learning from Las Vegas (co‐authored by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott‐Brown and Steven Izenour), but the study avoids a direct engagement with the underlying structures and meanings delivered by those symbols. 6 This is made clear in Denise Scott‐Brown's blunt assertion that “Las Vegas is not the subject of our book,” instead it is a guide to understanding the possibilities of symbolic architecture, but not a study of the place itself. This thesis presupposes knowledge of Learning from Las Vegas, as the 1972 book diagrams numerous details about Las Vegas architecture that are left out here. 7 But I use their work as a tool to understand something they didn’t much care about: it is an attempt to enter into the content of these symbols to unpack their historical and ideological significance. The Last Frontier Casino is used here as a thematic anchor, not only because of the resonance of its name, but because the various characters associated with this resort exhibit certain tendencies of the frontier people that Turner describes. But it also gives special consideration into the simple authoritative act of naming, therefore the structure of this text is based on a chronological timeline of its changing names and stages of ownership: The Last Frontier (1942‐1955), The New Frontier (1955‐1967), The Frontier (1967‐1999), The New Frontier (1999‐2007). This gesture of renaming is an assertion of each new owner’s role in renewing the image of the property, subsequently updating the thematic relation to the very notion of the American frontier as it shifted culturally. It is in this atmosphere of confused progress that a new kind of architecture emerged, one that would use 6 naming and theming to populate aesthetic and conceptual space, concurrent with similar movements in pop culture but actualized with a physical presence unavailable in other popular forms. Beginning with a dream in 1940, (Chapter 1) The Last Frontier deals with the particular significance of this casino and its early role in developing a unique architectural language in Las Vegas. This is done by clarifying this resort’s specific relationship to Hollywood, and to a shifting notion of the frontier. Evoking geological substance underneath this architectural hallucination, (Chapter 2) The New Frontier only touches on the casino’s thematic shift into a space‐age theme to explore the nearby desert as a testing ground for high technology, reaching back to the military processing plant that gave the city (and the Last Frontier) its first economic boost. The important role of the atomic test site, opened just outside of the city in 1952, solidifies the regional link to the military and creates a visual experience whose impact was so great that it affected casino design of the following decade. The Frontier (Chapter 3) resumes the theme of hallucination by going into the psychological aftermath of atomic testing in the 1960’s. The threads of the first two chapters (Hollywood and atomic testing) converge in the mythology surrounding the casino’s third owner, Howard Hughes, with a behind‐the‐scenes look at his film The Conqueror starring John Wayne. The territorial drive of the frontier as exemplified by Wayne and Hughes disintegrates into ruin as the nation transitions out of the era of aboveground atomic testing. After a long pause to let the dust settle, we’ll return to (Chapter 4) The New Frontier, as the casino was renamed 7 in the 1990’s. After two decades of quiet but steady growth, the city enters its most excessive boom that triggers a series of “implosions” – spectacular demolitions that celebrated the rise of real estate prices while erasing architectural landmarks. The New Frontier was the last casino to be spectacularly imploded in 2007, marking the end of an era of the likewise spectacular growth of the city and setting the stage for yet another notion of frontier, another space to be filled in both spatial and ideological terms. Concluding this story is The Great Unconformity, going back to the desert and to how the Las Vegas Valley looked before the sprawl and the noise. The Great Unconformity is a geological site of great significance on the eastern rim of Las Vegas, where a gated residential community creeps up to its edge. This site demonstrates a gap in the layers of earth of over a billion years. Evoking a time frame that makes development in the city seem futile, The Great Unconformity is virtually unknown to the people in the city. And though this ambivalence toward geology exists in virtually any city, it is here, where trompe l’oeil sky ceilings cycle through day and night every 20 minutes, where buildings that reference the history of architecture from the pyramids to the Empire State Building, and where these same buildings can be closed and demolished in as short as 4 years after they are built, where the disconnect between these two frames of time is so abrupt. 8 Introduction Endnotes 1 A technical term used by geologists, an unconformity is a buried erosion surface separating two rock masses or strata of different ages, indicating that sediment deposition was not continuous. It is used here for effect and to set up its later usage in the conclusion. 2 For an involved discussion on this connection between special effects and class, see Klein’s book cited in the next note. 3 Klein, Norman M.. The Vatican to Vegas: The History of Special Effects. illustrated edition ed. New York: New Press, 2004. (pg. 10) 4 Fontainbleau, a $4 billion dollar project that went bankrupt, and was sold on auction for $150 million to Carl Icahn, who shows no signs of intending to finish the project. City Center, an $8.5 billion project, has performed badly since its opening in December of 2009. 5 While I will move in an out of casino signage, this general assertion of Las Vegas’ indigenous aesthetics is borrowed from Dave Hickey where he labels neon (quoted in a New York Times article on Sept 5, 2001) "the only indigenous visual culture on the North American continent.” I would probably expand this into a larger list, but neon’s specific relationship to the desert here is very important. 6 Co‐authored by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott‐Brown and Steven Izenour in 1972, the book serves as a manual on architectural moves that were influenced by pop art. Like some, but not all Pop Art counterparts, a dissection of meaning in commercial symbols was not a priority over a loose engagement with the idea of symbolic structure and its potential. VSBI write in Learning: “Just as and analysis of the structure of a Gothic cathedral need not include a debate on the morality of medieval religion, so Las Vegas’ values are not questioned here […] this is a study of method not content” (pg. xviii) 7 While this shouldn’t take the place of reading the actual text, I’ll list a few particularly relevant quotes from the first edition: 1. “This architecture of styles and signs is antispatial; it is an architecture of communication over space; communication dominates space as an element in the architecture and in the landscape. But it is for a new scale of landscape.” (pg. 4) 2. “Beyond the town, the only transition between the Strip and the Mohave Desert is a zone of rustling beer cans. Within the town, the transition is as ruthlessly sudden. Casinos whose fronts relate so sensitively to the highway turn their ill‐kempt backsides toward the local environment, exposing the residual forms and spaces of mechanical equipment and service areas.” (pg. 42) 3. “The intricate maze of under the low ceiling never connects with outside light or outside space. This disorients the occupant in space and time. He loses track of where he is and when it is. Time is limitless, because the light of noon and midnight are exactly the sam.” (pg. 44) 9 The Last Frontier “In a recent bulletin of the Superintendent of the Census for 1890 appear these significant words: ‘up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its extent, it’s westward movement, etc., it can not, therefore, any longer have a place in census reports.’ This brief official statement marks the closing of a great historic movement.” 8 1. The quote above is the resonant first paragraph of Frederick Jackson Turner’s The Significance of the Frontier in American History, where he brings up the statement from the census that marks the end of the frontier. In the text, he argued that the frontier influenced the national identity more than any other feature of American history, writing “to the frontier American intellect owes its striking characteristics,” like a “restless nervous energy,” “dominant individualism,” and a “masterful grasp of material things.” Of course his rhetoric totally ignores the perspectives of the indigenous people that had occupied these lands before the settlers arrived and his logic is clearly embedded in the ideology of Manifest Destiny, though he never used the term. Omitted perspectives aside, his reflection on how the practical necessity of the frontier shaped the identity of European occupiers still resonates a century later. Although mainly focusing on the recent past, Turner made powerful allusions as to the way this narrative would carry into the future: America has been another name for opportunity, and the people of the United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion 10 which has not only been open but has even been forced upon them. He would be a rash prophet that would assert that the expansive character of American life now has entirely ceased. Movement has been its dominant fact, and, unless this training has no effect upon people, the American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise. But never again will such gifts of free land offer themselves. 9 Of course one result has been the American presence abroad that developed in the 20th century, perhaps shunted along in some small way by Turner’s polished translation of Manifest Destiny into academic language. 10 But there were also internal consequences. As the period of the frontier and the violence that it came with ended, the rewards of that struggle were overwhelmed by the psychic aftermath. Cinema, in its role as a kind of “training device for modernism”, 11 would reformat the frontier into the Classic Western, effectively shifting the site of national character formation to the cinematic space created in Hollywood. The Western frontier was disappearing, and without a physical space to be won, the dream‐work of cinema would breathe new life into it. 12 This can be most clearly seen in the rise of the Western genre, but also in Gangster and Detective films. These popular genres play out the contradictions in modern America as a vast social ritual, a ritual that is at once collective and individual. This tension between the collective and the individual is repeated over and over in genres such as the Western, whose central theme is the balance between individual freedom and collective rule of law. The Gangster film also has these qualities. Although audiences often come to identify with the freedom embodied by the gangster, it is understood that he must die to 11 keep order in balance. The hard‐boiled detective is similar, as he shuns society and “does things his way,” he always manages to find universal justice through an intense sense of individuality. This sense of capturing universality through individuality is the grand contradiction of American mythology, the same one that Hollywood is founded on. The individuals involved in early Hollywood were themselves a part of the fight for the West, and the aggressive traits described by Turner were their own to celebrate. 2. Thomas Edison’s role in prompting the film industry to go West was the result of his restrictive movie camera patent, which forced filmmakers to leave the East coast, because they would face lawsuits from Edison if they attempted to build their own cameras. Their escape West came late, after the announcement in 1890 by the census that free land was no longer available, but for them freedom from regulatory constraints was more important than land. 13 This group of strong willed individuals who sought freedom escaped from the stratified power in the East, to go on to build the great film studio system, continuing the American frontier ethos. Hollywood was of course founded at the terminus of the frontier, and while its position at the Pacific edge is significant so was the moment of its origination, punctuating the era of territorial expansion and subsequently absorbing the ideology of the frontier. All at once, it provided a new site of national character formation, a de‐spatialized analogue to Turner’s frontier, which carried with it the 12 burden of dealing with a recent, violent past. The success of the Western was tied to its portrayal of this violence, but further, the existence of the entire apparatus that produced it was tied into the history of this very violence. In Hollywood film analysis, perhaps no figure has been used to illustrate the mythological conflicts of American consciousness as much as the Western hero. 14 Thomas Schatz writes “the Western hero, regardless of his social or legal standing, is necessarily an agent of civilization in the savage frontier. He represents both the social order and the threatening savagery that typify the Western milieu.” He continues: “the Western hero status as both rugged individualist and also as agent of civilization that continually resists his individualism.” 15 This constant tension between the individual and common good, Schatz explains, lies at the center of the logic and symmetry of the plot narratives in dominant genres. Many of the early resort casinos on the Las Vegas Strip would spatialize these genre narratives into thematic architecture, as we see with the Frontier (Western), the Stardust (Science Fiction), the Flamingo (Gangster 16 ), Caesar’s Palace (Classical Greece Period Drama), the Aladdin (Oriental Myth), and others. This continued in the 90’s with the Excalibur (Middle Age Period Adventure), the Luxor (Egyptian Period Adventure), etc. Schatz attributes the construction of this mythology to the ritual of the audience and its preferences. Ultimately the feedback loop generated from profits turns the system into one where the audience essentially becomes the author. Schatz asserts, “One of the reasons for a genre’s popularity is the sustained 13 significance of the ‘problem’ that it repeatedly addressed,” a kind of dream‐work produced by mass‐social cultural anxieties. Still, this tidy system disregards the variance of influence involved in this imperfect process, as clearly the writers, directors, distributors, even theater owners are also the film audience, and through proximity carry a larger weight of agency in this culture industry than the average audience member. The point is, the people in the film industry were not outside of any of the mass‐social concerns that were being worked out, but rather at its most influential, magnificent core, negotiating the confluence of space and power that is the frontier. Its not surprising that the “invention” of cinema, sometime between 1891‐1895, came right after the 1890 census report announced that the frontier was closed, cancelling the promise of free land that drove Europeans West. 3. As the second resort on the highway leading into Las Vegas, the Last Frontier gave definition to the Strip in 1942, both spatially and conceptually. It provided the second point on the line forming the stretch that would turn into the center circuit of the fastest growing American city of the 20 th century. With its Western “village” attraction, a dirt pedestrian walkway with frontier‐era style buildings, it also had a huge effect on the themed resorts that would follow in the coming years. Many Western‐themed casinos would come, as well as themed references to other places and eras. But whether the Last Frontier itself was actually themed is up for debate, as it embodied a style that had already existed in Las Vegas, if less ostentatiously. 14 The El Rancho, the first Strip resort, was also Western style that was nothing if just vague about its local style in order to avoid alienating visitors from California. The Texans who built the Last Frontier would take a different approach. Their casino was an overt embodiment of Western vernacular, but while it entered into the realm of themed architecture, the concept in this pre‐Disneyland era was unique, and if anything its usage here was an incremental step into pastiche. Its symbolic distance to the West was complicated in that this pastiche bled into its surroundings, in its relationship to the historical frontier, and its disappearance as described by Frederick Jackson Turner 17 . Turner had decades earlier restated the official announcement that the frontier had officially disappeared, 18 an assertion that was simultaneously redacted and repeated by the creators of the casino in their creation of the new Last Frontier. An additional influence was the mythology of the Hollywood Western, and the urge for that sign structure to reassert itself spatially. Materially, the Last Frontier Village was probably not unlike the Paramount Ranch near Malibu, except that movie set town was only experienced at the theatrical distance of cinema. In Vegas, the proscenium was broken and the audience entered into a space of artificial surface normally reserved for cameras. The idealized Western aesthetic of the Last Frontier Casino was movie theater magnate R.E. Griffith’s revision of the frontier, which he did with the help of his nephew William Moore beginning around 1940. An architect with a then growing reputation for his theater designs, Moore helped Griffith realize his vision 15 of a resort that mimicked the inside of a filmic space that they were previously responsible for exhibiting in their theaters. This came during the biggest decline of the film industry, the end of the supposed Golden Age of Hollywood. The connection to cinema forged by Moore and Griffith would continue in Las Vegas as methods, materials, and concepts were imported from Hollywood as set designers turned into casino architects. 19 Even the mega‐resort casinos into the 90’s were compared to giant temporary movie sets by their creators. 20 The conception of The Last Frontier came at a time when there was increasing pressure from the government on the monopolies held by Hollywood production companies and movie theaters, which led to the Supreme Court case US v. Griffith in 1948, 21 one of the largest antitrust suits brought against the studios and theaters, in which the courts called for the "divorce of production and exhibition and the elimination of unfair booking practices." The year 1948 is commonly known as the end of the Golden Age of the Hollywood studio system. Griffith may have sensed this impending collapse and branched out his endeavors in casinos during his last years as a way to diversify his fortune. The name Griffith chose for the Last Frontier was specific to the landscape it was built in, but perhaps also to the succession of his own endeavors. With the decline of theaters and the legalization of gambling in Nevada, casino building would indeed mark the development of a new freedom and a new place for that pioneer spirit to resume its development. The design of the Last Frontier, like Western cinema, was meant to hold onto a time period. But something happened there in the real desert that never could in 16 the cinematic image: authenticity bled into the themed and artificial aesthetic, essentially amplifying the existing history of the region. Where every aspect of film is a construction, the Last Frontier casino produced a tension between pastiche and reality. Las Vegas historian David G. Schwartz, in his essay on the first Strip casinos, describes the use of Robert Cauldhill’s enormous collection of frontier‐era artifacts from Nevada to liven up the atmosphere of the Last Frontier. In 1947, Griffith and Moore convinced Cauldhill to open his heretofore private collection to public view and designed the Last Frontier Village around it. The village was designed to display artifacts so that ‘the public would be allowed to see it and use it and actually were not charged for viewing it.’ But Moore did not only want to preserve the past; he admitted that he wanted to use it as ‘an advertising method in order to induce people to come to the hotel and stay there—patronize the hotel, patronize the village. 22 That real artifacts of an earlier period were brought into the resort speaks to the urge to tell a story about a specific history of the region. And although this is quite different from the faux‐finish future of Las Vegas, it remains an important moment in the development of the veneer of artifice we expect in the city. Creating a direct physical connection to Nevada’s history, the pioneer relics on display, some which could actually be used by visitors, also created a distance through the implication of the performance. Moore’s urge to preserve the authenticity embedded in artifacts as well as use their allure implies their pliable status between prop and authentic relic, which gave the same variability of existence to the status of the resort. This all happened in a space that was designed after the old Western gambling halls that were common at each stage of the disorderly frontier until the local law caught up. Thriving on risk and optimism, the historical connection between gambling and the 17 frontier were fused as together they travelled West. 23 In Nevada’s case, gambling was outlawed in 1909, but was legalized again in 1931 making it the only state in the nation with a this cultural connection to the frontier. It was only a matter of time before someone would take the frontier away from Hollywood and reposition it in the landscape, and it would take Griffith, a movie man, to do it. 18 The Last Frontier Endnotes 8 Turner, Frederick W.. The Significance of the Frontier in American History. Los Angeles: La Anonima, 2010. 9 Ibid. 10 Turner’s thesis had a huge effect in American politics, but even internationally. When German geographer Friedrich Ratzel visited the United States in the late 1800’s, he was pleased with the results of manifest destiny, yet like Turner he never used the term in his own writings. Rather, he adopted Turner’s Frontier Thesis, which became the basis for Lebensraum, a term he coined that signified a belief in the expansion of Germany into colonies. While he never called for expansion within Europe, Adolf Hitler detailed this belief in Mein Kampf that this territory should be taken to the east. 11 Quote taken from film theory professor Jon Wagner, from a lecture in 2009 at the University of Southern California. 12 Of course this is not completely true, as the age of neo‐colonialism would soon begin and the U.S. Military would soon swarm all over the world, setting up bases and lines of influence in these places. But one of the strengths of neocolonialist power is in its ability to evade definition, and perceptually exist outside of an older notion of the frontier, which I would argue has persisted in the American psyche over a century after its closure. 13 Free land and good weather was also an important demand for the industry. 14 Rick Altman outlines two opposing theories about this process in his essay, A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre. The “ritual” approach, he describes, is a national mythology that evolved from box‐office paybacks, where “by choosing the films it would patronize, the audience revealed its preferences and its beliefs, and thus inducing Hollywood’s studios to produce films reflecting its desires.” The other approach would describe the way that “audiences are manipulated by the business and political interests of Hollywood,” a view that has “recently joined hands with the more general critique of the mass media offered by the Frankfurt school.” While my own sympathies lie somewhere in between, I draw heavily from the former for the purposes of this essay, borrowing its approach to the historical development of American mythology. 15 Hollywood Genres, Thomas Schatz (1991) 16 This might be a stretch, being that the space was not actual themed around gangster films, but the very history of its creation was of course mythologized through Bugsy’s life performance as a gangster. After thinking about his attempts to enter Hollywood acting, the aspects of performativity of his actions might be considered. 17 Here, “disappearance” can almost be interchanged with “fixedness.” As the geographic frontiers between nations became fixed, the conceptual frontier as a site of progress disappeared. 18 The Significance of the Frontier in American History, published 1921. 19 One notable example is Martin Stern, one of the most influential Vegas architects of the 60’s and 70’s, who worked as a set designer before doing work in Vegas. 20 Anthony Marnell II, Architect, quoted from Modern Marvels: Las Vegas, produced by the History Channel: “If we were to wait to actually have the end product designed, these buildings would be taking four and five years to build instead of two and three years to build. So what we’ve had to do is we’ve had to go after a more universal structure, by universal structures I mean spaces that have far less columns in them, buildings that have much higher ceilings in them, which give designers much more flexibility as to how they’re going to arrange the non structural or non‐bearing walls inside the movie set. I mean that’s what they are, these are not historical buildings. People will not be coming here 2000 years from now, looking at these buildings. This is one large movie set that continually evolves and continually changes.” His company, Marnell Corrao Associates, have a long list of some of the largest casino designs, including the Wynn, Bellagio and the Mirage. 21 U.S. Supreme Court, United States v. Griffith, 334 U.S. 100 (1948), which happened the year he died. 22 Schwartz, D. (2001, February). Ambient frontiers: The El Rancho Vegas and Hotel Last Frontier — Strip pioneers [27 paragraphs]. Electronic Journal of Gambling Issues: eGambling, [On‐line serial], 3. 23 For more information on the connection between the frontier and gambling see: Findlay, John M. People of Chance: Gambling in American Society from Jamestown to Las Vegas. New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 1986. 19 The New Frontier “During the Cold War, desert modernism took on a decidedly masculine form, combining military science with corporate capitalism in a highly gendered national performance. […] In findesiecle Nevada, we can watch a specific 20thcentury optimism (for technology and the possibility of endless self reinvention) circle back to confront itself in the lives of weapons scientists, tunnel engineers, conspiracy theorists, and sequined entertainers. Indeed, these sketches attest to the contradictions of a disabled master narrative of progress” 24 1. The story of the military industry’s involvement in the region started in the valley when Las Vegas was just a small town of 16,000 people. Though it probably didn’t have Las Vegas in mind, the federal government’s role in providing the means for this settlement to happen in this desert is easy to underestimate amidst the popular myth of the city’s founding by Bugsy Siegel. 25 It can be argued that the U.S. Department of War’s 26 decision to build a magnesium plant in the Las Vegas valley is the sole reason that the city exists on the scale that it does, as other towns in this part of the state wilted in the heat. The economic and infrastructural boost for the town to become a city was created by the need for this magnesium to fuel WWII planes. The plant employed more workers than the Empire State Building and the Hoover Dam at that time, and it also doubled the population of the valley, boosting the economy with 16,000 new weekly paychecks. But economics were not the only factor in energizing this parched railroad town. To operate the Basic Magnesium plant, the biggest ever, a large pipeline was built in order to bring 30 million gallons 20 of water to the valley from Lake Mead every day. 27 After the plant closed, this pipeline continued to quench the town’s thirst for growth and allowed it to become one of the few cities of its size built so far from a body of water. The average conception of Las Vegas’ beginnings probably doesn’t conjure an image of such a tremendous movement of materials, as it goes against the immaterial illusion that the city thrives on. But in its first stages of growth, half of the city was a company town, part of a wartime effort so huge that it confounded the scale of other such projects before it. In its two years of operation (1941‐1943), the plant produced 166 million pounds of magnesium, more than all of the magnesium produced in the entire world in 1939 and 1940 combined. 28 Production of this light metal used to build fast airplanes was an important factor in deciding the outcome of the war. In company newsletters produced for the workers at Basic Magnesium, and on billboards erected around the town‐site, workers were constantly reminded of the importance of their jobs to the war effort. 29 The cheap single‐family housing units that the government constructed around the plant were not enough to house all the workers, so those that didn’t build shacks along the highway found housing in town. 30 This migration of workers boosted the hotel industry and for the first time casinos constructed built‐in accommodations: the first hotel/casinos. This was of course an important development, but so were the original houses that the government built. As it did in San Diego and other military fabrication towns, these cheaply built single family homes became the model for the suburban sprawl that would take over the rest of 21 the city outside of the Strip. Today known as Henderson, the town surrounding the magnesium plant is now completely contiguous with Las Vegas, and the sprawl of houses dominates the horizontal growth in the valley. That the origination of these designs was based on temporary, foundation‐less homes is a signal to the ambivalent state of residential architecture in the city. A particularly uncomfortable contradiction arose out of a newspaper article on the results of the atomic bomb test in 1953. The film of this test has since become iconic, demonstrating the destructive power of an atomic bomb on a typical American home. The story written by a Las Vegas reporter essentially relays some of the results of this test as passed on by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). 31 The most important thing to know in the case of an atomic attack, conveyed the reporter, is that the safest part of any house is the basement. At the end of the article he provides another fact as though it was little more than a passing thought: because of a thick layer of clay in most of the valley, almost all Las Vegas houses were built without basements. These shallow foundations not only made residents susceptible to attack, but also gives off the impression of being highly disposable. This lack of basements in residential buildings in Las Vegas continues as another glaring contradiction arose over the years: a high percentage of these same houses were built with pools, often as deep as a basement would need to be. Demonstrating that the building style equals the city’s transient temperament, the pools create an external illusion of 22 depth while the houses sit on the topsoil, with shallow foundations to anchor them to the earth. 2. In 1955, the Last Frontier underwent a facelift to modernize its image and compete with the growing number of resorts on the Strip. In the period leading up to the space race (Sputnik was launched in ’57), there were cultural preparations being made through science fiction, which came into its own as a film genre in the early 1950’s. The aspirations of Earthly progress was not enough for the acceleration of technological innovation at the time, and space was starting to become the symbolic replacement for the West. Of course, as the leader in genre borrowing, the Last Frontier shifted its image to absorb the cultural moment: the name changed to the New Frontier, and the resort took on a space‐aged theme, reopening three months before Disneyland launched its Western Frontierland and Space‐Aged Tomorrowland themes. The New Frontier also opened three years before the Stardust Casino opened next door in 1958, with its Sputnik shaped sign and star field interior. This thematic transition from “The West” to “space” signaled liberation from geographical limits into the undefined parameters of outer space, relieving some of the anxiety of the lost frontier by way of a utopian imaginativeness. And as the symbolic articulations of these casino signs developed into complex systems, the development of materials and technology used in the 23 signs also took on a parallel development. The aesthetic of neon lights in the dark empty desert elicited its own formal set of responses. Although the use of neon in Las Vegas exploded in the mid 50’s, there was a precedent to this new radical phenomenon of light in the isolated desert. In 1951, the atomic bomb was first tested in the Nevada desert, and then continuously as a weekly pre‐dawn ritual for about twelve years. The test‐site’s positioning in this sparsely populated landscape was a pragmatic solution for the United States, in an effort to de‐escalate from the previous testing boundaries of exploding bombs in the Pacific. With little or no international pressure or oversight, the desert presented itself as a media stage for the theater of American technological superiority. With an attitude established by the successes of the Hoover Dam and Basic Magnesium, the underlying ideology of the Nevada Proving Ground was wrapped in the frontier logic of spatial progress. Of course this land just north of Vegas was not empty, nor uninhabited, but the small number of people there weren’t enough to deter the tests. The AEC had knowledge of the residual effects, and not only ignored the repercussions to those living downwind, but also actively worked to keep these cases out of public view while strategically disseminating images of the tests. 32 Regardless that the increasing understanding of the health risks would eventually lead to the demise of the program, the intended power of the events lingers as an image in the collective consciousness of Americans and the rest of the world alike. This vast empty land presented itself as a location for these great experiments, and the regular illumination of this desert at night had powerful 24 aesthetic suggestions, especially to those living in the area. In addition to the atomic workers who mostly lived in Las Vegas, only an hour drive away from the site, the general public there had a view of the flash. Eventually a culture grew up around the weekly ritual of bomb‐watching, urged along with a public relations campaign between the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce 33 , local newspapers 34 , the P.R. offices of the casinos 35 , and the Atomic Energy Commission 36 . A segment of the tourists that came to Las Vegas, a figure that the Chamber of Commerce said was as high as 2%, came primarily to watch the bomb blasts. Various casinos also held events around the bomb viewings, and promoted these events with ephemera such as a set of postcards released by Binion’s Horseshoe. A notable example of these types of related events was the weekly “Dawn Bomb Party” at the Desert Inn Sky Room. Here every week, fascinated tourists and locals partied on Monday nights, drinking “Atomic Cocktails” and dancing to the “Atomic Boogie Band.” 37 It all ended with cheers at dawn every Tuesday morning when the bomb would go off. That this particular visual culture would have an effect on architecture is worth some speculation. Photographs of Vegas in the early 50’s reveal relatively dark façades when compared to the latter part of the decade, a result of the rise of commercial sign types that was concurrent with the rise of the automobile. But something else developed in Las Vegas that didn’t in Los Angeles, or even in other gaming cities like Reno: the complete obliteration of architecture with neon light, turning every inch of the facades into electro‐luminescent light shows. The power of illumination in this city, isolated in the desert was like nothing anyone had seen 25 before, except of course, in the radiance of the atomic bombs, seen weekly by the people who lived here. As if in convivial competition, the neon and the bombs got progressively stronger into the sixties, when finally in 1963 the atmospheric tests were banned because of accumulating data on their hazard to the health of those downwind. The tallest neon sign to date was built in 1965, and as if a declaration of the victory of neon in this competition to light the desert, the design looked strikingly similar to the shape of an atomic mushroom cloud. 38 At 216 feet tall, the Stardust sign became one of the most famous signs on the Strip and a mirror of a history specific to the region, a rare gesture in more recent casino architecture. 3. In the 1950’s there were dozens of photographs printed in L.A. newspapers showing the glow from the atomic bombs over the mountains to the east. In many cases, onlookers gaze at the glow, silhouetted by the power of its light over the range of contrast allowed by film. This kind of activation of a landscape with or for a viewer has a long history in Romantic landscape painting, and such a strategy reinforces the significance of the gaze. Landscape painting played an important role in the history of the American frontier, often playing out a tension between primitivist and progressive positions. As Leo Marx explains in his essay The American Ideology of Space, the progressive position of the larger culture could have swayed the way that images were produced: 26 Why did so many mid‐century American painters produce work that ignored or denied the conflict—of which they, like Cole, surely were aware—between the new industrial technologies and the beauty of the landscape? There are several possible answers. One has to do with the depth of their commitment to the form itself, which is to say, to the very concept of a landscape painting as an affirmation of pastoral harmony between society and nature; another has to do with the intimidating social power, the virtual hegemony, exercised by the national faith in progress. 39 Marx describes the work of Asher Durand and other landscape painters in which the gaze was directed into the unknown frontier. The people in these paintings are often depicted as settlers, with the movement heading left across the picture plane into the setting sun going down behind the mountains beyond the plains. This visual language of trains moving left symbolizing westward expansion, a reference to the European maps, also carried into the language of Hollywood cinema (particularly present in the Western genre, where landscapes are key). Often, the symbol of technology and progress in these paintings was a railroad, and in pictures that contain larger numbers of people, the direction of the train serves to embody the collective gaze. Marx describes the symbolic power of the locomotive in his description of the popular lithograph Across the Continent: Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way by Currier and Ives. He writes “The message hardly could be more explicit: progress, as represented by the powerful new technology, will overwhelm the natives and help to establish a new white European empire in North America.” In the case of the above‐mentioned Los Angeles newspaper images, the glow from the atomic bomb replaces the locomotive as the “powerful new technology” situated in the landscape. Except the new images are more oblique, because that 27 mysterious focal point, once accessed by painters with the controlled use of a distant haze, exists in the photos as pure light. This is the forced depth that stretches the subject into infinity, with the artificial light of nuclear experiments replacing the hazy vastness of Bierstadt’s fog. The figure, gazing into the light, amplifies the significance of the dispersed focal point with no edge. It is the technological sublime without an object, an atmospheric addition to the natural landscape. Further the technology becomes the natural, both in the image and in the atmospheric dispersion of its being: the bomb itself is of course reduced to dust that becomes a thin layer on the surface of the desert. This process of transforming man‐made destruction into a natural event is described by Peter B. Hales in his essay The Atomic Sublime. According to Hales the early articulation of the mushroom clouds in photography were unsettled, but as the tests in the Nevada desert played out, it was portrayed as a “new species of being”. He writes: And so article after article in the dominant voices of the era, each with its worrisome words, would be accompanied by the reassuring, sensual, awesome photographs of the atomic sublime. Implanted in the mythology of the American landscape for a decade, the atomic explosion had become inextricable from its surroundings. No gothic horror, it seems, could eradicate its majestic beauty, its resonance with the numinous Absolute, its freedom from moral imperatives. 40 Beyond the framing of the bomb as a kind of natural progression of technology by the media, Hales argues that the decision to situate these events in the Nevada desert was highly symbolic and tied to the history of manifest destiny. 28 While Hales does not write about these images of figures peering into the glow of the explosion, the striking similarities of these photographs to landscape painting are supported by his argument. And while these could have been careless snapshots, evidence of their manipulation make it clear that a high level of consideration went into the crafting of these glowing images. The photographs were airbrushed to accentuate the contrast of the glow in relation to the landscape, and in at least one case the figure is also partially drawn in. It leads one to wonder how much of a glow there actually was, if any, or if the entire event is the product of darkroom dodge and burning techniques along with airbrush and pencil touchups. Its clear the newspapers were searching for a very specific image, and wanted to turn this event into an icon. The relation to similar pictures made in Las Vegas, which often omitted the ponderous figure in the foreground, shows there was an early importance given to the image of the glow, beyond the mountains—that artificial light when captured and extended on film gave it the power and symbolism of a sunrise. This symbol was a distant cousin to the mushroom cloud, which became so powerful an image that it buried into obscurity this other powerful image. Regardless of its diminishment, the evidence of these glow images speaks to a repeating ideology surrounding representations of this technology in the landscape. 29 The New Frontier Endnotes 24 Masco, Joe. "Desert Modernism." Cabinet, Spring 2004. 25 This long‐time myth was popularized in popular culture in the film Bugsy, when the main character drive stops in the middle of an empty stretch of highway in the desert and visualizes his creation. In fact, the El Rancho and the Last Frontier already existed, and the Flamingo project already had a foundation poured before the historical Ben Siegel ever saw it. The project was originally the vision of Billy Wilkerson, and Siegel forcibly became his partner before pushing him out of the project. 26 Now known as the Department of Defense. 27 Nevada Senator Harry Reid gives these statistical facts in a short video he narrates about BMI, as the Basic Magnesium complex is now known. The video, entitled Battleborn: History of BMI is available on the BMI website at: http://www.landwellco.com/battleborn‐video/index.php (retrieved May 10, 2010) 28 Ibid. 29 The Big Job, Basic Magnesium, Inc (The Basic Magnesium Newsletter) often gives credit to the shifting war to the efforts of their plant. 30 Dobbs, William T.. "Southern Nevada and the Legacy of Basic Magnesium, Inc.." Nevada Historical Society Quarterly 34 (1991): 273‐303. 31 John F. Cahlan, “Atomic Test Proves Basements of Home May Be Safest Place,” Las Vegas Morning Review Journal (March 19, 1953) 32 Titus, A. Constandina. Bombs In The Backyard, 2nd Edition: Atomic Testing And American Politics (Nevada Studies in History and Political Science). 2 Sub ed. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2001. 33 The Chamber of Commerce printed a map of various locations from which had the best view of the bomb. (See Titus) 34 Articles from the time of the tests in the Las Vegas ReviewJournal assured residents of their safety and ridiculed critics that spoke about the risks of the blast. For a list of articles see the appendix of Explosion / Implosion (the visual supplement to this text). 35 A letter from Jake Freedman, Director of Public Relations at the Sands writes to “OUR PRESS, ATOMIC TEST OBSERVERS, AND GOVERNMENT FRIENDS” ostensibly assuring them that 200 civilian reservations will be cancelled to assure rooms for their visit. 36 The AEC controlled all images of the blast, and had a strong influence on the representation of testing in the media. (See Hales) 37 Titus 38 While I’m still trying to confirm this influence by surviving frontage designer Brian Leming, it has nonetheless a cultural meme that can be found in many writings about the sign. This also brings to question the signness that already exists in the mushroom cloud, and how the way we’ve come to “read” the mushroom cloud’s incorporation into sign culture is helped along by virtue of its formal similarities to a pylon sign. This circular dynamic of influence perfectly converges formally and linguistically into the Stardust sign. 39 Marx, Leo. "The American Ideology of Space." In Denatured Visions. New York: The Museum Of Modern Art, New York, 2003. 62‐78. 40 Hales, Peter B.. "The Atomic Sublime." American Studies 32.1 (1991): n. pag. American Studies. Web. 10 May 2010. 30 The Frontier “In Las Vegas no farseeing entrepreneur buys a sign to fit a building he owns. He rebuilds the building to support the biggest sign he can get up the money for and if necessary changes the name.” 41 1. In his 1965 essay on Las Vegas, Tom Wolfe describes the assertive character trait that thrives in Vegas. On numerous occasions he brings up Las Vegas’ position as the “new American frontier,” but his essay also develops an image of the attitude that underlies the frontier. Wolfe visits the county hospital psychiatric ward, quoting an unnamed doctor there: “I recognized extreme aggressiveness continually. It’s not merely what Las Vegas can do to a person, it’s the type of person that attracts. Gambling is a very aggressive pastime, and Las Vegas attracts aggressive people. […] And yet the same aggressive types are necessary to build a frontier town, and Las Vegas is a frontier town, certainly by any psychological standard,” Dr. ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ is saying. “They’ll undertake anything and they’ll accomplish it. The building here has been incredible. They don’t seem to care what they’re up against, so they’ll do it.” 42 Wolfe’s essay gives particular importance to the ostentatious designs of neon signs produced at the time, 43 attributing these developments to the enterprising characters that built them. The writer recounts a conversation he had with the designers of the Dunes sign, which would be done in “flaming lake red on burning desert gold.” The sign, explained Dunes president Major A. Riddle, would be visible from an airplane 50 miles away, which was a goal they arrived at when they realized that the city still had one “display to be topped.” 31 This was the control tower at the airport, which was visible from 40 miles. His account narrates the struggle to dominate the skyline. The aggressive individuals described by the doctor, “who didn’t seem to care what they were up against” are reflected in this story about the Dunes sign. That it was challenging the federally operated control tower for visibility seemed striking to the author. This aesthetic antagonism by a private entrepreneur towards a public institution 44 is the central conflict of the frontier manifested in visual culture, the conflict between individual freedom vs. common interest. 45 After decades of this conflict being mythologized in numerous Western and Gangster films, a collision of these two genres manifested in Las Vegas as gangsters from the east began to populate positions of status in this western town. Although Wolfe makes no mention to this, the law would later implicate Major A. Riddle, the president of the Dunes whose office he sat in; he was involved with the Chicago outfit. 46 Soon the remarkable success of these gangsters would be diminished by the appearance of a man of another status. Howard Hughes, the world’s richest man, born rich but maybe still the most ambitious entrepreneur of the time, made his way into Las Vegas in 1966. On a spending spree that included the acquisition of the Desert Inn, the Castaways, the Landmark, the Sands and the Silver Slipper, Howard Hughes also purchased the New Frontier in 1967. He again changed the name of the resort, following Wolfe’s description of this tendency two years earlier. This time it 32 was changed to The Frontier, removing the modifier and its relation to time. The Frontier was now solid‐state. 2. Towards the end of his life, Howard Hughes inscribed his name into the history of Las Vegas. As the story goes, he was in his suite at the top of the Desert Inn, when the rotating slipper outside his window started to bother him. The Silver Slipper had opened as a small casino in the Last Frontier Village when it was first built. Its large rotating slipper sign pointed into Hughes’ room on each rotation. One version of the story told occasionally says that Hughes believed the CIA had placed a camera in that rotating slipper specifically to monitor his activities, which led him to purchase the whole property, stop the rotating component of the sign, and fill it with concrete. 47 While this may be an exaggeration of the more plausible story, that the light from the sign simply bothered him, the sign was made motionless after he purchased it. In the 2000’s, twin monuments to the Silver Slipper sign were erected in downtown Las Vegas. The first was a part of a beautification project that involved bringing classic neon and animation bulb signs back to downtown. The city chose to bring back the Silver Slipper, 48 but because the costs to refurbish the original was too costly, they instead chose to make a cheaper imitation. 49 This became the “Ruby Slipper,” a much smaller, more plastic version than the original steel sign. The Ruby Slipper was of course done in typical Vegas fashion: “if you can’t have the original 33 then remake it.” With a similar logic of seen in developments like the Venetian and Paris casinos, the type replication in the second Slipper is central to the way Vegas manifests the frontier in the present. As if these folds of simulation weren’t enough, a new addition to downtown has added a layer of confusion. At 821 N. Las Vegas Blvd, just a half mile away, the original Silver Slipper was restored and installed as a second public monument to the sign that bothered Hughes. Like R.E. Griffith before him, Howard Hughes was a movie man before he ventured into the casino business. His failures in Hollywood toward the end of his career as a movie producer may have contributed to his ongoing mental deterioration. He was said to have watched one of his final productions, The Conqueror, 50 on continual loop in his suite at the Desert Inn. It was one of the most expensive productions to date, 51 and yet it didn’t have a wide public release until 1974, when it was shown on television. Described as one of the worst casting decisions ever made, The Conqueror stars John Wayne as the young Genghis Kahn. 52 Wayne cannot hide his American drawl in his performance as the Mongolian king, and the red‐headed Susan Hayward, is also so out of place as the Tartar princess. Shot in cinemascope to showcase the desert landscape it was shot in, it has the feel of a Western in disguise, with an empire‐expanding theme driven by an unapologetic megalomaniac. Why, of all of Hughes’ films, was The Conqueror the one that he was obsessed with? There were other critical and financial failures, but none could have had the psychic burden that resulted from the circumstances and tragic aftermath of this 34 production. Shot in the desert downwind of the Nevada Proving Ground, the area was contaminated with radioactive fallout, a danger that the AEC was vigorously denying. During the shooting of the film, a particularly dirty bomb called “Mike” was set off, which dumped radioactive dust all over the location in Snow Valley, near St. George. 53 Many of the shots were particularly dusty, with hordes of extras charging on horseback into battle. Of the 220 cast and crew members, 91 died of cancer including the entire first billed cast. This of course included John Wayne, a vocal champion of military armament and aggression during the Cold War against the Russians. 54 The resonance of this sequence of events has been kept out of popular myth, and even while Wayne’s own children believe his death was due to Mike’s radiation, 55 the predominant story is that smoking was the cause of his cancer. This sanitized history belies a powerful contradiction in American history, that Wayne, a national emblem of individuality and masculine aggression was killed by the military’s performance of the ideals he championed. 3. The Conqueror is not the only example of a Hollywood film connected to the story of nuclear testing in the region, and the repercussions of its once unknown side effects. While the Hughes’ film tells this story and is related to the mythology surrounding it, another earlier science fiction film took these themes up directly. Set at the Nevada Test Site, the 1957 film The Amazing Colossal Man begins with a dialogue between army soldiers waiting for an atomic bomb to go off, when a pilot 35 crashes his plane near the detonation site. Colonel Glenn Manning leaves his post in the trench to save the pilot, but gets caught in the blast before reaching him. Besides being terribly burned, the effect of his exposure to this new type of “plutonium bomb” is a cell mutation that causes him to grow into a giant. This growth is accompanied by an increasing state of frustrated confusion, and after escaping his tent the giant goes on a slow and deliberate rampage on the Las Vegas Strip. Clearly informed by the proximity and shared regional culture between the test site and the casinos, the transition of settings fulfills the urge to composite these two charged sites into one image, activated by the confused anti‐hero. The oversized casino sign elements, like the crown on the Royal Nevada and the Silver Slipper sign are relative to the giant’s own scale, and he approaches these objects with an odd sense of recognition. He wrenches the Silver Slipper off its pole and ponders it in his hands and smiles until he has a dizzy spell and moves on. Only after police shoot at him is he antagonized into violence, and he retaliates by tossing the palm tree from the Tropicana at a crowd of spectators and punching through the Dunes sign like it was a cardboard prop. Of course, these set elements are props, but given the shared building history between Hollywood sets and the actual casinos, the shoddy set elements parallel the cheap, superficial building techniques in casinos, which are themselves described as giant sets by their own designers. 56 In demonstrating this disposability, the Colossal Man’s tantrum anticipates the spectacular demolitions on the Strip four decades later. By coincidence, the Dunes was the first casino to be both smashed by the 36 fictional atomic giant and imploded by a casino mogul: the amazing colossal man, Steve Wynn. The film exhibits discomfort about the effects of this new war technology, but also a nervous sense of scale and permanence, a growing tension between people and monuments in secular modernism. The colossal man, whose size and strength spirals out of control while his heart grows disproportionately slower than the rest of his body, like Frankenstein’s monster, becomes the subject and martyr to our unrestrained advancement. Order is recuperated during the final sequence when the giant, having advanced to the Hoover Dam, is killed before he could cause harm to this fountain of American pride and resourcefulness. As crude a film as it is, this b‐rated allegory reflects a sincere anxiety about this new and dangerous technology, depicting the Southern Nevada landscape as the site of this struggle. Further, the inclusion of casino architecture in the scenography and the subsequent violence to these objects anticipates a series of hyper‐aestheticized casino demolitions that would crystallize in the 1990’s, spectacles that have their own connection to the bomb‐watching events of the 1950’s. 37 The Frontier Endnotes 41 Wolfe, Tom. "Las Vegas (What?) Las Vegas (Can't hear you! Too Noisy) Las Vegas!!!." The KandyKolored TangerineFlake Streamline Baby. 1st ed. New York: Sold, 1965. 3‐27. 42 Ibid. 43 His descriptions, “bubbling, spiraling, rocketing, and exploding and sun bursts 10 stories high out in the middle of the desert – celebrate one‐story casinos,” would be important to the writers of Learning from Las Vegas, who cited his text and spoke of its importance to them. 44 In this case the Federal Aviation Administration, then known as the National Airworthiness Authority. 45 This conflict continued up into the 90’s when Bob Stupak’s design for the Stratosphere, originally planned to be the tallest structure in the world, had to be scaled down so as to not interfere with the airport. 46 While there are many sources on Riddle’s mob ties, I chose to cite a particularly amusing one: the blog of a woman named Stephanie who happened to move into Riddle’s childhood home. Stephanie learned of the man and did some research, and she describes meeting a 77 year old neighbor who knew the family: “He told us that Riddle got rich during the Depression because he would sell rigs to his truck drivers and finance their purchase, then when they were 3/4 paid for, he would lay them off and foreclose on the loans by taking the rigs, so he had a reputation as a shady guy.[…] It becomes apparent that Riddle's trucking company here in Indiana had some pretty serious mob connections, and that he was involved with the Teamsters in Chicago and Vegas, too.” Mineart, Stephanie. "Major A. Riddle and Old Lady Riddle's House ‐ Commonplace Book." Commonplace Book. http://www.commonplacebook.com/journal/major_a_riddle.shtm (accessed May 26, 2010). 47 Cridland, Tim, and Joe Oesterle. Weird Las Vegas and Nevada: Your Alternative Travel Guide to Sin City and the Silver State (Weird). New York: Sterling, 2007. 48 A public/private partnership between the City of Las Vegas and local business owners. 49 In conversation with Danielle Kelly at the Neon Museum. 50 Group, Icon. Hughes: Webster's Quotations, Facts and Phrases. New York City: Icon Group International, Inc., 2008. 51 One poster design for the film brags “2 years in the making, at the cost of $6,000,000!” 52 This opinion can be found on numerous film critic blogs including: Dryden, Mark . "12 of the Worst Casting WTFs for film adaptations – ARTICLE : OneMetal.com." OneMetal.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 May 2010. <http://www.onemetal.com/ 2010/02/24/12‐of‐the‐worst‐casting‐wtfs‐for‐film‐adaptations/> 53 For more information about the details of the contamination of the Conqueror and the area near the test site in general, see Miller, Richard L.. Under The Cloud: The Decades of Nuclear Testing.: Two‐Sixty Press, 1999. 54 Ibid. 55 Jackovich, Karen, and Mark Sennet. "The Children of John Wayne, Susan Hayward and Dick Powell Fear That Fallout Killed Their Parents." People 10 Nov. 1980. 56 Anthony Marnell, quoted above in endnote 20, page 17. 38 The New Frontier “When I hear ‘recession,’ I ask, ‘What have you got for sale?’ ” 57 1. In 1998, Phil Ruffin purchased the Frontier, and renamed it back to the New Frontier, an echo of its second name. It was as if leading a naming palindrome back in on itself, except it would be destroyed before having a chance to be renamed the Last Frontier, ending where it started. Ruffin ended a seven‐year strike by the culinary workers union that damaged the image of the Frontier, but it was too late. The casino was increasingly empty except for an aging clientele, except of course for those millennials who ironically patronized Gilley’s Bar to ride the mechanical bull. In the face of this irony from a new target market, the Western‐themed frontier was truly dead. In 2007, the New Frontier property was sold at a record $34 million per acre, and imploded by its new owners. In its last moments the entire building became a sign, ignited by a pyrotechnic countdown flaring from its grid of windows. This was the culmination of a cultural phenomenon that lasted 14 years, when just about as many casino towers were imploded in that time, averaging one per year. Although it’s too soon to say for sure, the implosion of the New Frontier might be the last of such events, and definitely for a while. This period of demolition and development is a barometer for the frantic optimism and real estate speculation party that spread 39 throughout the nation, and also of the subsequent hangover. The adjacent lots of the most recent implosions from 2007, the New Frontier and the Stardust, both sit empty as the projects that were set to be built there are put on hold. A casino across the street, almost finished but also put on indefinite hold, saw a loss of over $4 billion after the project went bankrupt. 2. The first implosion of a casino in Las Vegas happened in 1993, and it was different than any building demolition before it. While the use of explosives to demolish an unwanted structure has a history of spectatorship in America, 58 in the implosion of the Dunes, Steve Wynn created a $1.5 million spectacle that attracted 200,000 visitors. 59 Still riding the massive success of his Mirage mega‐resort (opened in 1989), Wynn timed the detonation to coincide exactly with the opening of his new family oriented casino, the pirate‐themed Treasure Island. 60 Like a theatrical drama with two personified towers, the explosion of flames from every floor of the Dunes was simulated to have come from a cannonball attack from the new Treasure Island. Fifteen controlled demolitions of casinos would follow the one at the Dunes, many of which would create a show out of the event, but this first implosion was the most violent of them all. The large explosion, timed as if caused by the imaginary cannonball, was preceded by a number of smaller explosions and fireworks. In total 465 pounds of nitroglycerine‐based explosives were used to detonate the structure, 40 but not before 550 gallons of aviation fuel were ignited to create the massive aesthetic fireball. 61 Like the many press photos of the atomic bomb, the flash at the Dunes overexposed the image on just about every camera, and in a brief moment that was probably unplanned, the small explosions each took the familiar shape of small mushroom clouds. In 1961, when the Dunes tower was built, it was the site of viewership of another spectacle of a very similar attitude. 62 For a year before the ban on atmospheric testing in 1962, the atomic bombs at the Nevada Test Site could be seen best in the valley from this tower, then the tallest in the state. It would turn out to be a fitting irony that the image of a mushroom cloud would echo back at the end of its life, but also shouldn’t be such a surprise. The implosion of the Dunes was the destination of a cultural drive in the region, part of the latest iteration of the frontier: a celebratory spectacle of technological precision, material destruction, and aggressive economics without regard to practicality. These might be the conditions of the new frontier that Turner was forecasting, the “wider field for the exercise” of American energy, inherited from the enterprising ethos of the old one. The destructive spectacles announce this in deadpan, yet their fleeting beauty is not unlike a puff of smoke from a magician’s cufflink; a mesmerizing distraction. While it might have been a relatively cheap building, the Dunes was a crucial architectural link to the past in Las Vegas. Without the celebratory framing of its demolition, it might have caused a sense of sorrow to see the landmark disappear in a moment, but the drums of jet fuel used the Dunes was the perfect mask for the loss 41 of material history that was happening. The sign was kept lit with the marquee announcing “no vacancy” as if the hotel was still open, jokingly gruesome, suggesting the casino was filled with people. It was, for Wynn, the perfect tone of a gesture to be absorbed by mass media and an opportunity for him to promote his next project. The Dunes spectacle became media event broadcast on TV news station all over the country. Wynn ensured media saturation by buying an hour of prime‐time air on NBC for a fictional mini‐movie promoting the new casino. 63 Targeted at kids, the story follows Robbie, a 12‐year old boy who imagines he meets Long John Silver during his stay in Las Vegas. It climaxes with an action sequence that leads to the destruction of the classic casino, initiating a symbolic battle between the old and the new that would carry into the aesthetics surrounding implosion shows to come. 64 In a gesture of demonstrating his alignment, Wynn (playing himself) walks up to Robbie and pledges: "You just remember this, ol' shipmate, you are welcome here absolutely anytime." With the fall of the family market in Vegas this promise might seem to have been broken, but ten years after the production Robbie would be just old enough to gamble at 22, in time for the 2003 rebranding of Treasure Island. TI dropped its literary reference down to a sexy minimal acronym and was developed as a club‐themed casino for the new whathappensinVegas crowd who want to blend childhood nostalgia with lascivious partying. However successful or not the Treasure Island’s theme had been, the implosion event that initiated its opening has persisted as a device for erasing 42 cultural memories to make way for new ones. This is the moment that a kind of planned obsolescence on an architectural scale began to shift the skyline of the city on a continual basis. Before the Bellagio was even built on the lot where the Dunes sat, the Landmark, Sands, Hacienda, and the Aladdin had all been imploded. An average of one casino a year would follow: The El Rancho (2000), 65 The Desert Inn (2001, 2004), 66 Castaways (2006), Bourbon Street (2006), Stardust (2007) until finally the Frontier was destroyed in November of 2007. This was part of a decade long party of rising land speculation that trivialized the value of the structures that sat on it, so in a way, the market determined that the buildings had to be destroyed. The rapid succession of these events in the final two years, like the grand finale of an expensive fireworks display, marked the end of this party. Almost symbolically, just after the New Frontier was demolished the housing market followed less than a year later. With this monument to the frontier imploded, the dark spot left on the Strip beckons the question to Americans of how this space should be filled in the wake of a grand illusion disrupted. 43 New Frontier Endnotes 57 Wenzl, Roy, and Travis Heying. "Vegas a comfortable fit for Phil Ruffin's billions." The Wichita Eagle, April 25, 2010. 58 An advance in the technique of engineering these blasts happened around the beginning of the 20 th century, a notable example being the fire ravaged city hall in Delaware, Ohio where over 2000 spectators viewed the event. For more information on this history see Brent Blanchard (February 2002). "A History of Explosive Demolition in America". Proceedings of the Annual Conference on Explosives and Blasting Technique. International Society of Explosives Engineers. 59 TOM GORMAN. 1993. Vegas Has a Blast as 200,000 Watch Demolition of Dunes. Los Angeles Times, October 29. 60 A casino with a literary reference, the resort was based on the Robert Louis Stevenson adventure story of the same name. As the family themed casinos failed to be as financially successful as those that attracted the adult crowd, Treasure Island ridiculously attempted to drop its pirate theme and rebranded itself as “TI”, with a sexy nightclub atmosphere. The street side dramatization of a pirate ship attack called “Buccaneer Bay” became “The Sirens of TI”, a nautical battle of the sexes between hard‐bodied men and women. 61 There are varying accounts of the amount of jet fuel used, from 460 gallons in Rubble: Unearthing the History of Demolition by Jeff Byles (pg. 281) to 16,000 liters on Wikipedia. Only 5 years after the terrible Pepcon Jet Fuel plant explosion that shook the valley, it is worth wondering whether Wynn’s choice of materials to simulate an explosive was influenced by that event. 62 Named The Diamond of the Dunes, an addition built up from the earlier low‐rise resort. 63 The product placement ad was titled Treasure Island: The Adventure Begins. Wynn paid $1.7 million for the airtime, and NBC was later accused of not adding the required labeling to the program saying that the air‐time was paid for. Michael Jacobson of the Washington‐based Center for the Study of Commercialism comments on the subject: "What these specials are is a subtle form of advertising, it's powerful because we're not told it's advertising. There's no pitchman, no ordering opportunities. But viewers should know that what they're watching is basically an infomercial, and these specials are an extension of the tawdriest kind of commercialism wrapped up in electronic packaging." [GREG BRAXTON. 1994. TV `Specials': Commercials or Entertainment? Television. Los Angeles Times, June 15] 64 The opening of the New York New York casino in 1996 also coincided with an implosion show, the Hacienda. This happened during the transition of the New Year into 1997. 65 This is a newer El Rancho, built in 1983, presumably named after the first Strip casino. 66 After a $200 Million expansion in 1997, the newest Palms Tower was only in operation for four years before closed down and subsequently imploded in 2004. The older Augusta Tower was imploded in 2001. 44 Conclusion: The Great Unconformity For the first time in almost a century, Las Vegas has seen a decline in its population, a loss of 15,000 residents in the county in 2009. 67 Although its an improbable direction for someone moving away, one way out of the city is to take Lake Mead Blvd east, which turns into a two‐lane highway into the desert. After passing some old motels and restaurants, later some newer strip malls, a string of walled‐in communities marks the transition into the desert. Camouflaged in earth tones against the mountains behind them, the street names of one of these neighborhoods announce its attempts at withdrawal: Secluded Ave., Solitary Ave., Isolated Ave. But it is after the last residential perimeter that the desert begins to mock these attempts at compartmentalized freedom, and the minute scale of temporal presence exhibited by these constructions. The rock in the bare desert valley just outside of where Las Vegas is situated offers a view of another time frame. This desert is reminiscent of the popular image of ancient holy lands, and seated in the American West where numerous bible movies were shot. 68 If landscapes can be read, this place conjures a connection to ancient time because of these connections to an earlier human existence, but local geologists understand that this is a sliver of the timeline exhibited in the stone. Here at the base of Frenchman Mountain on the eastern edge of Las Vegas, a rare, almost unfathomably long geological time record is peaking out of the sediment. With an epic title that trumps the ridiculous misnomers of the mountain itself, 69 The Great 45 Unconformity is a gap in the layers of rock that spans 1.2 billion years, more than a quarter of the earth’s age. The older Precambrian granite and schist is 1.7 billion years old, and in terms of life was formed in the age of Eukaryotes, before multi‐ cellular organisms had evolved. The Great Unconformity’s existence is virtually unknown to most residents of the city, as the mountain disappears behind, or at best becomes a flat backdrop for the spectacle of the city. Going beyond a general apathy towards nature, a specific disregard to this vast record of time seems like an ideological necessity to maintain the illusion produced in the valley. In Vatican to Vegas, Norman Klein speaks to the idea that cities “monumentalize collective misremembering” culminating in special effects of Las Vegas. He writes: “Its plantation economy shifts into a new stage— toward new modes of special effects, new ways to erase memory, identity, sense of place. […] Las Vegas is a laboratory for special effects as erasure.” 70 Culminating in the casino implosions of the 1990’s, examples of erasure on a monumental scale, we see a developing dislocation from a sense of place in Las Vegas. This might be traced to the themed architecture pioneered at the Last Frontier Casino, which came out of an urge to recreate an ideal by a movie man whose industry was collapsing. Like a bad omen, the recent implosion of the New Frontier marked the end of a period of over‐accelerated growth, one that left a huge gap in the architectural personality of the city. The period of implosions left the Strip with its own great unconformity, a missing history redacted from the record, and it will have to do without this mature aspect of its character as it deals with the personality crisis of the recession, without a frontier in sight. 46 Conclusion Endnotes 67 Whaley, Sean. "Preliminary Estimates by State Demographer Show Nevada Lost Population in 2009 « Nevada News Bureau." Nevada News Bureau. http://www.nevadanewsbureau.com/2009/12/30/preliminary‐ estimates‐show‐nv‐lost‐population‐in‐2009/ (accessed May 26, 2010). 68 The Greatest Story Ever Told (starring Max von Sydow) and the Greatest Heroes of the Bible Miniseries were both shot in various locations in the southwest desert. 69 Most Las Vegans call it Sunrise Mountain, which is actually name of the smaller peak just north of Frenchman Mountain. Also it was originally named by locals who mistakenly thought that Paul Watelet, the Belgian who built a mine there, was French. 70 Klein, Norman M.. The Vatican to Vegas: The History of Special Effects. illustrated edition ed. New York: New Press, 2004. Print. 47 Bibliography Beardsley, John (ed.) and Leo Marx. "The American Ideology of Space." In Denatured Visions. New York: The Museum Of Modern Art, New York, 2003. 62‐78. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. New Ed ed. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2002. Broeske, Pat H., and Peter Harry Brown. Howard Hughes: The Untold Story. 2004. Reprint, New York and Washington D.C.: Da Capo Press, 2004. Brown, Denise Scott, Steven Izenour, and Robert Venturi. Learning from Las Vegas Revised Edition: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form. Revised ed. London: The Mit Press, 1977. Cridland, Tim, and Joe Oesterle. Weird Las Vegas and Nevada: Your Alternative Travel Guide to Sin City and the Silver State (Weird). New York: Sterling, 2007. Davis, Mike. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, New Edition (Paperback). London: Verso, 2006. Dobbs, William T.. "Southern Nevada and the Legacy of Basic Magnesium, Inc.." Nevada Historical Society Quarterly 34 (1991): 273‐303. Farquharson, Alex. Magic Hour, The: The Convergence of Art and Las Vegas. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2002. Findlay, John M.. People of Chance: Gambling in American Society from Jamestown to Las Vegas. New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 1986. Fox, William L.. In The Desert Of Desire: Las Vegas And The Culture Of Spectacle. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2007. Friedman, Bill. Designing casinos to dominate the competition: The Friedman international standards of casino design. Reno, Nevada: Institute For The Study Of Gambling And Commercial Gaming, 2000. Group, Icon. Hughes: Webster's Quotations, Facts and Phrases. New York City: Icon Group International, Inc., 2008. Hales, Peter B.. "The Atomic Sublime." American Studies 32, no. 1 (1991). https://journals.ku.edu/index.php/amerstud/article/view/2890 (accessed May 10, 2010). Hickey, Dave. Air Guitar. 1st ed ed. Los Angeles: Art Issues Press, 1997. 48 Jackovich, Karen, and Mark Sennet. "The Children of John Wayne, Susan Hayward and Dick Powell Fear That Fallout Killed Their Parents." People, November 10, 1980. Klein, Norman M.. The Vatican to Vegas: The History of Special Effects. illustrated edition ed. New York: New Press, 2004. Masco, Joe. "Desert Modernism." Cabinet, Spring 2004. Miller, Richard L.. Under The Cloud: The Decades of Nuclear Testing. .: Two‐Sixty Press, 1999. Mineart, Stephanie. "Major A. Riddle and Old Lady Riddle's House ‐ Commonplace Book." Commonplace Book. http://www.commonplacebook.com/journal/major_a_riddle.shtm (accessed May 26, 2010). Moor, Angela. "Operation Hospitality: Las Vegas and Civil Defense, 1951‐1959." Nevada Historical Society Quarterly 51 (2008): 292‐310. Peterson, Kavan. "48 states raking in gambling proceeds." Stateline.org. http://www.stateline.org/live/details/story?contentId=114503 (accessed May 26, 2010). Smithson, Robert. Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Solnit, Rebecca. "From Hell to Breakfast." In Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West. 1 ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. 3‐37. Thurston, Michael, and Daniel Rosenberg. "No one is Buried in Hoover Dam." In Modernism, Inc.: Body, Memory, Capital. London: NYU Press, 2001. 84 ‐ 106. Titus, A. Constandina. Bombs In The Backyard, 2Nd Edition: Atomic Testing And American Politics (Nevada Studies in History and Political Science). 2 Sub ed. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2001. Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Frontier in American History. Los Angeles: La Anonima Press, 2010. Vinegar, Aron. I Am a Monument: On Learning from Las Vegas. Michigan: MIT Press, 2008. Wolfe, Tom. "Las Vegas (What?) Las Vegas (Can't hear you! Too Noisy) Las Vegas!!!." In The KandyKolored TangerineFlake Streamline Baby. 1st ed. New York: Sold, 1965. 3‐27.
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Creator
Ferrer, Cayetano
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Core Title
The significance of The Last Frontier casino in American history
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School of Fine Arts
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Master of Fine Arts
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Fine Arts
Publication Date
08/10/2012
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05/01/2010
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atomic bomb testing,casino architecture,Frontier,Las Vegas,OAI-PMH Harvest
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Las Vegas
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Nevada
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English
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atomic bomb testing
casino architecture