Gas in las nv price vegas

Beyond the Strip's glitter, an amazing city is rising in the desert. Welcome to the West's new hometown

We are driving among the new subdivisions in Green Valley, southeast of Las Vegas, where the red tile roofs spread like tamarisk to the desert's edge. Out in the distance, the Strip flickers to life in the late-afternoon light. In the American imagination, Las Vegas has always been just the Strip - Sin City, Bedford Falls without George Bailey, Mardi Gras without Lent. Now Hal Rothman, professor of history at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, is showing me a different city - what some people might say is the real Las Vegas, the modern American boomtown.

Rothman has lived in Las Vegas for six years. He has a new house going up in Green Valley Ranch, and we maneuver around an array of earth-moving equipment to go see it. His street is noisy and dusty, filled with construction workers, cement mixers, and lots and lots of brand-new houses. He points out a couple of lawns that have just gone in, a sign of imminent occupancy.

"When you move in," he says, "at first everything feels so new that it's uncomfortable. Then you just reinvent the space. You end up doing for yourself what the city is doing on a bigger scale. Las Vegas is what it is. It's constantly being reshaped."

The city being created here in the Nevada desert isn't just another Sun Belt metropolis, where the crabgrass meets the creosote bushes. Today's Las Vegas is remarkable in that it is both an international city - loud, glittering, and over-the-top - and the West's new suburban frontier. In the process, Las Vegas manages to be like everywhere. and nowhere else at the same time.

Rothman and I both grew up in older neighborhoods in the Midwest. We went to the same university, and we share an interest in historic preservation. I have a hard time imagining living in a neighborhood that sprang from the scrub only months before. He's moving into such a neighborhood in a month.

As we drive away from the subdivision and onto wide commercial streets lined with strip shopping centers, Rothman sums up a feeling that both addresses my doubts and is common in this emerging city.

"When I moved here, people used to apologize about living in Las Vegas," he says. "They don't do that now."

In 1990 the population of Clark County was 770,280. Last year it reached 1,192,200. In the first half of 1997, nearly 15,000 new residences were built in the county, and it received some 6,000 newcomers a month. Suburban Henderson is currently the fastest-growing city in the nation.

Given those statistics, I had come to Las Vegas fully prepared to accept its transformation into the new all-American city. As it turns out, I wasn't even off the plane before Vegas began to assert its very Vegasness. Chuck Berry was on my flight, and later that night, who should I see among the rock and roll artifacts of the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino? None other than this living artifact playing the $1 slots.

Then there was the full-size version of Homer and Marge Simpson's cartoon house being given away as a promotion by home builder Kaufman & Broad in a subdivision dubbed Springfield. There were showgirls filling up at gas stations, and a slot machine sound track - clanka, clanka, bing, bing, bing, bing - playing everywhere from the big casinos to strip-mall supermarkets.

Like Los Angeles, its bigger and older sister, Las Vegas is for many a hard city to love. It's about as quaint as spandex. Say postwar here and you're probably referring to the Persian Gulf.

In a city growing so fast, it's easy to build subdivisions. But how do you build a community? Residents new and old worry about the problems that come with growth: traffic, crime, double-session schools, and sprawl.

Yet many newcomers are surprised at just how much they enjoy living in the city. Alan Lipsky, director of development for the Lied Discovery Children's Museum, moved out from New York a few years back. He says there's something exciting about watching such a wide-open story play out.

"History is being reinvented here constantly," Lipsky says. "But I had a professor in college who told me that the great thing about New York in its heyday was that it didn't have time to look back either."

The new Las Vegas appeals to both high and low rollers. Rothman, who is writing a book about the city, says, "Las Vegas is the last Detroit." He explains that it's a blue-collar service economy where - like Detroit in the boom years of the auto industry - the good life is available to worker and boss alike.

The average dealer in a good Strip hotel, Rothman says, can make $35,000 to $40,000 per year. That's a reasonable salary in a city where $140,000 can buy a 2,000-square-foot house and the overall cost of living is 15 percent less than in Los Angeles (which may explain why a third of Vegas newcomers have arrived from Southern California).

At the same time, Las Vegas has a tradition of thinking very big. From the building of Hoover Dam to the construction of 9 of the 10 biggest hotels in the world, things tend to happen here on a colossal scale.

Out on the fringes of Henderson, Lake Las Vegas, a $4-billion residential and resort development, continues that tradition. This project centers on a 2-mile-long, 145-foot-deep manmade lake. Brochures promise the resort will include Venetian-style gondolas and a hotel designed to resemble the Ponte Vecchio in Florence. The average custom home price is $1.5 million, with waterfront lots going for as much as $1.75 million. Custom mailboxes run $2,000.

"We are the candlelight to the Strip's neon," says Sherri O'Boyle, vice president of marketing for Lake Las Vegas Resort. "We have people come out here and say, 'This is my dream. I just never knew where to find it.'"

Economically, the Strip's neon remains where it's at in Las Vegas. Despite the growth of new industries like Ocean Spray cranberries and institutions like UNLV, tourism - which draws 30 million visitors per year - remains the engine that powers Las Vegas's growth. More than 26 percent of the population works directly in the tourism industry, with another 30 percent indirectly tied to it. Some studies show that every hotel room creates 10 new jobs.

With its faux-knows design ethic, the Strip demands a suspension of disbelief. Still, there are moments when, fake as it all is, the Strip can seem plenty dreamy. At those times one begins to understand why visitors will push their luck on quickie marriages (100,000 annually) without much more thought than they'd give to a dollar-ante poker game. On such sweet dreams and bad bets was Vegas built.

But for all the wild abandon of its patrons, the Strip is bacchanalia by banker. Steve Weeks, assistant division manager with YesCo, the Young Electronic Sign Co., which, during its 77 years in business, has put up many of the city's signature neon signs, puts it this way: "The town is going beige on us."

He means that both literally and figuratively. Specifically, he is referring to Steve Wynn-owned properties like the Mirage, which in their bid for a more high-end image have opted for variations on off-white signs. But in a larger sense, Las Vegas is a more corporate town than it used to be, says Weeks.

Back in 1969, when he first began working at YesCo, everything was much more personal. "A lot of business was done with a handshake," he says. "It was a totally different feeling dealing with the man who owned the place. Now it's all accountants, vice presidents, and marketing people."

Some old-timers find themselves nostalgic for the High Vegas of the 1950s Rat Pack era. They speak of meals sent over by the pit boss when a family member was sick, and freebies for familiar faces, even if they weren't high rollers. They recall stories of Sammy's and Frank's class the way Angelenos recall the scent of orange blossoms.

Or they retell stories, like the one about the casino owner who had just gotten out of prison. He offered money to a church for a new Sunday-school room. The minister refused to accept his donation, so the congregation got rid of the minister, took the money, and went ahead and built the room.

Celesta Lowe is the one who told me that story. She is 81 years old and lives in a cinder block house next to Flamingo Wash. You can pretty much trace Las Vegas's saga through the three generations of her family.

Lowe's grandfather arrived in Las Vegas from Richfield, Utah, in 1905. He was a subcontractor who worked grading the new railroad. Her father was a miner: his mine is now under Lake Mead. In fact, Lowe can recall running the Colorado River in motorboats before Hoover Dam construction began.

She got married in 1935 on a platform at Helldorado, Las Vegas's annual Western blowout, and remembers a drunk Death Valley Scotty riding in the parade. Her brother designed the menus at the Flamingo, the hotel that mobster Bugsy Siegel opened.