LAS VEGAS, Nev., April 16 (UPI) -- "I never go to the Strip," Las Vegans say with pride.

"Tourists never see the real Las Vegas. It's L.A. without the taxes and crime."

"We have theater and a symphony orchestra."

"There's a real sense of community here."

"There are more churches per capita in Las Vegas than in any other city."

Why do Las Vegans feel the need to say these things, over and over and over again?

To find out, I decided I would go searching for the non- gambling Vegas. I would look for this sense of history, community, continuity in this city that claims it's "just like any other city once you get away from the Strip." And I decided I would start by driving out to the Las Vegas Springs.

These Artesian wells are the only reason for the existence of the town. On the ancient Spanish trail between Santa Fe and Los Angeles, this particular patch of the Mojave was known as the "jornada de muerte," because it was always littered with dead animals and abandoned wagons. The only place to stop between the Virgin River and the Mojave River, a 55-mile deadly stretch, was at "las vegas," the meadows, where there were four deep bubbling pools fed by Artesian springs. Around these springs, known to the Paiute Indians for centuries, developed the Las Vegas Ranch, which for many years in the 19th century served as a kind of spa for tired travellers going to and from the mining districts.

I started driving. All I knew was that the springs were about four miles west of the Old Mormon Fort. (The Mormons lasted three years, from 1855 to 1858, and cheered with relief when headquarters at Salt Lake City told them they could abandon the fort and return home.)

The first place you come to is West Las Vegas, the part of the city that most tourists have never seen and don't know exists. It's a rundown neighborhood where blacks were most or less forced to live until well into the seventies. The Italian mob, which controlled that sort of thing, was notoriously racist, but it had more to do with the fact that they were in competition with black gangs in their home cities than with any particular political views. The cowboy casino owners on Fremont Street, on the other hand, thought that blacks were just flat bad for business.

When the Rodney King riots broke out in 1992, they lasted three days in Los Angeles--but West Las Vegas had its own Rodney King riots, and they didn't end for three weeks. The reaction of the casino owners was typical: as long as the riots didn't reach the tourist areas, they were content to let it flame out naturally. (The vast destruction of West Las Vegas businesses was thought of as the much lesser of two evils.)

The casinos were successful: the sheriff considered it a victory when a blockade kept the rioters away from the Strip and downtown. After the riots, there was the inevitable flurry of let's-fix-West-Vegas projects, but it remains a bleak and tatterdemalion district, with substandard housing and the ghostly presence of the Moulin Rouge casino, the "black" casino in the era of segregation, now abandoned except for one room where someone sells T-shirts and other souvenirs that say "Historic Moulin Rouge."

Next you drive past strip malls and auto parts stores and used car lots and low-income subdivisions and, on the low rock fences, gang graffiti. Las Vegas has 150 teenage gangs. Unlike the street gangs of Los Angeles and New York, they move around mostly in cars. They're banned from the Strip and downtown after 9 p.m., but then all teenagers are.

Not that anyone would ever see them anyway, because everyone lives in "gated" communities. In most cases this amounts to housing subdivisions hidden behind cinder-block walls, like Middle Eastern army barracks. For some reason there are twisted and abandoned shopping carts everywhere, lying like giant metal tumbleweeds outside the gates of the subdivisions. Inside there are green lawns (an expensive luxury) and dwellings that look more or less like the ones in Tucson or Phoenix, but there's no connection between the neighborhoods. It's a landsape of bricked- in compounds, extending in all directions, with grey scrub and tacky salvage businesses in between.

Part of the reason for the high walls is to protect children from the atmosphere of gambling, drinking and sex that pervades the Strip. Yet it somehow seems to seep through the stucco anyway. In the underfunded high schools, suicide prevention is a required course. The dropout rate is 12 per cent. The school buses have special baby seats for all the unwed mothers. Las Vegas is first in the nation in teen drug use and first in violence.

And perhaps the unhappiness is passed on by parents, because the adults commit suicide at the highest rate in the country, too. They also consume more alcohol and have more auto accidents per miles driven than people in any other city. But that makes sense because Nevada leads the nation in DUIs. On the good side, 10 per cent of the population is enrolled in a twelve-step program.

When a high school student looks for a job, he looks on the Strip. When a Mexican immigrant needs money, he goes to the Strip. When a family of four goes on an outing, they might choose one of the no-frills casinos like Boulder Station, where a multiplex cinema, a Starbucks and a Burger King share hardwood flours with slot machines and a cozy sports book where Dad can watch the game--but it's still a gambling hall with a Strip mentality.

When a politician runs for office, he can't expect to get elected without the support of the Strip, which provides 50 per cent of the campaign funds for all elections, city, county, state and national.

Las Vegas, in short, is a one-industry town. Every once in a while the city makes some gesture toward diversification, as when Levi Strauss opened a distribution center in 1996. But when the deal was announced, casino mogul Steve Wynn openly derided the Development Authority.

"You would have thought the Hoover Dam was being built again," Wynn was quoted as saying at the time. "The party they threw was so disproportionate to the amount of people hired, but everybody was so happy. And the rolling thunder that accompanied the arrival of Citibank--oh, my God, it was like, Hallelujah!" Together the two new companies created 2,000 jobs.

MGM/Mirage alone employs more than 50,000.

I never found the springs, by the way. I drove and drove, past dozens of subdivisions, through the dry grey dust of what was once the "jornada de muerte," and the farther you go the less the roads look like roads and the less the houses look like houses.

I finally turned around and drove back, later learning that the springs have been gone for 50 years. They dried up in the late forties because people drilled so many wells in the valley that the water table was depleted, even after the Hoover Dam was built. I'm told you can find some depressed ruts in the ground where a traveller once sounded one of the springs to a depth of 60 feet, but the water table now is 300 feet down and sinking farther every day.

Las Vegas is not "just like any other city" when you get away from the Strip. Because there's no way to get away from the Strip.

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