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| The interior of a stretch limo Hummer. Now you know. |
The Mob Museum was very interesting and surprisingly up-front about the Mob basis of Las Vegas. Put simply, modern Las Vegas is here because of two things – the gambling (which also attracted the Mafia) and the building of the Hoover Dam, which brought in thousands of male workers without family support. Both contingencies are fascinating, and a third reason for its fame is even more arresting - the hundred or so open-air nuclear explosions of the fifties and the thousands of government employees this brought in.
The Mob Museum’s exhibits and films cover the continental US, not just Vegas, and I admit, this not being my area of expertise, many of the names were only familiar to me through movies. Donnie Brasco. Untouchables. G-Men. Al Capone. St Valentine’s Day Massacre.
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| The Mob Museum |
The museum is close by Fremont Street, which was the buzzingest part of Vegas when I first went but is now a sort of muddy tide pool left by the southbound outrushing wave. I remember getting an amazing abstract space-landscape painting here, painted by a young man who used spray-paint cans on a sheet of cardboard just lying on the concrete, employing the edges of other paintings and can lids to mask and shape the paint. (I saw him, or possibly his son, on the street by Cinq this time, now using a turntable at elbow height and with a respirator mask for protection, still doing similar paintings.)
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| 1999 painting by that guy, whose name I can't make out. Sorry about cell-phone photo/glare. |
It was uncharacteristically raining in Vegas this day, and that was how I learned that the canopy over Fremont Street is not actually waterproof. Apart from the old-style casinos - Four Queens, Binions, Golden Nugget - there was little going on except a flock of Russian women who hand you a sachet of something, maybe moisturizer, and while you are trying to work out what to do with it, engage you in conversation designed to work up to selling you something. I never found out what because after I rudely extricated myself from the first woman’s clutches, I managed to stay out of range of all the others. It does boast a Walgreens (they’re everywhere in Vegas) which had a rain-proof poncho for sale. (They apparently had two umbrellas under the counter but since they had lost their price tags, they couldn’t sell those to me.)
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| 4 Queens in the rain, useless canopy above |
I’d made up my mind to walk from Fremont Street back to Caesars before I realized it was raining, and once I had the poncho, I went ahead and did it.
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| Stratosphere in the rain |
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| North Vegas signage |
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| More north Vegas signage |
It was very cold, and wet, and not a nice part of town. It was six and a half miles back to Caesars, which gave me plenty of time to observe that the storm drains in Vegas are not built for downpours, so sheets of water several inches deep cover the sides of roads for several feet in. This means that troll-ol-ol drivers can play at splashing you by driving through them (since the sidewalks are wide enough to avoid the splash you can usually laugh along with these little teasers) but it also means you can’t avoid the flow whenever you cross a side-street. My Payless Shoe Sores shoes are So Cal designs, strictly not for use in damp conditions. They seemed to suck water inside by some sort of instep-driven pumping action and then not let any of it out again. Probably could come in useful in the Third World, but as shoes qua shoes, not at all useful.
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| The Circus Circus clown is watching me float down here |
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1 comment:
When you mentioned walking from Fremont back to Caeser's, my first thought was "wow, that's gotta be a long way". 6 1/2 miles from the old strip to the new strip. That had to have been an interesting walk.
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