Rothman 2002

From UANotebook

citation

Neon Metropolis

notes

"Even though American morality has loosened considerably, Las Vegas was not yet truly legitimate. In 1983, CitiCorp located a service center in Las Vegas. This financial giant so worried that its credit card clients would balk at mailing payments to a Las Vegas address that it invented a fictitious town, "The Lakes, Nevada," to soothe its customers. No one in Las Vegas minded. "We would have let them call it CitiBank City then if they'd wanted to," recalled Somer Hollingsworth, then a leading banker and president of the Nevada Development Authority in 2000."

--pg xvii

"Postmodern, postindustrial capitalism is about consuming experience, not goods, about creating insatiable desire that must be fulfilled in front on an approving audience."

--pg xiii

"In this new world, experience has become currency and entertainment has become culture."

(entire paragraph is excellent)

--pg xviii

"Las Vegas changed before the rest of American society did. Its limitations forced Las Vegas to bend to the will of whatever would generate its revenues. This dependence gave Las Vegas a fluidity, a way around the rules of midcentury America, that locals learned to treasure. The city learned that its shape was always transitory, always flexible, not only because it responded to the emotions of a larger culture, but also because the forces that were behind the city were on the borders of legality. Even in moments of great success, Las Vegas ad a powerful sense of impermanence, a strong intuition that whatever reuled today migght well not tomorrow."

--pg xxii

"The fundamental basis of the world economy shifted away from natural resources --of which Las Vegas had few-- and toward a combination of information and entertainment that took advantage of an array of new technologies, from the VCR to the Internet. This transformation was as comprehensive as the industrial revolution."

--pg xxii

"In part, the diminishment of community-wide ties resulted for the nature of the planned communities. Green Valley and Summerlin were designed to be self-contained, as complete as the casino-hotels that dominated the local skyline. They offered their residents everything they could possibly need, affirming both the babhy boomer's sense of being entitled to it all and the cocoonlike insularity of similar places elsewhere. Again, Las Vegas reflected crucial trends in the nature of American life with great clarity. Transparent in its actions and aspirations, it spoke to the core of the impermanence of postindustrial American culture."

--pg 272

"The world of planned communities was not aesthetically sophisticated. Architecturally and to an increasing degree culturally, suburban Las Vegas took its lead from Los Angeles and especially Orange county. Its architecture was "basically vanilla", remembered Steve Bottfield of Marketing Solutions, which researches the desires of home buyers and builders. As long as Las Vegas remained fundamentally a working-class town, it has all the visual charm of Peoria. Las Vegas was "a visually impoverished environment," UNLV architecture professor Keith Eggener, who soo fled to Columbia, Missouri, used to moan. The pseudo-Spanish-style houses with their red tile roofs, surrounded by cement block walls, created living that was intensely private. Block in and oriented toward the backyard instead of the front of the house, they gave anyone who wanted it their own private Los Angeles suburb."

--pg 272

"The three-car garage became the ultimate symbol of status. Between the late 1980s and the early 1990s, a mini-revolution occurred in this simple functional device-turned-amenity. Without basements --as a result of the hard pan caliche clay just a few feet below the surface-- homes lacked adequate storage space."

--pg 274

Page 276 details the 1990s housing market marked by inspections-as-formality, cheap construction, and low-resale desirability as most people preferred new construction.

"The gates were soon everywhere, a function status rather than of security. Most gates were hardly a deterrent to criminals. They remained open to accommodate construction traffic, you gave the code to the pizza place so they wouldn't have to call from the gate when they arrived, the exterminator had it, and so did the carpet layer and every other tradesman. The landscaping companies, with trucks full of Latino workers who mowed lawns and trimmed trees, also had the code, as did your kids' friends, the ice cream guy, and even the door-to-door salesman."

--pg 277

On Henderson, looking to bridge the gap of its two haves --industrial old Henderson and uppity Green Valley-- to unify the town:

"The most powerful institutions the city [Henderson] could muster to support is reinvention were libraries and public parks. Parks and libraries offered shared space and commonality of values, civic interaction and socialiazation. They combined education, relaxation, and social cohesiveness, all desirable traits in a growing community.. Their very nature minimized differences and magnified similarities. they were crucial building blocks, piece of the puzzle of quality of life that served the community and enhanced its reputation. They were also cornerstones of any model of changing outside perceptions of the city."

--pg 284