I booked myself into the first resort ever built in Las Vegas.

I'm betting you don't know what it is. If you said The Flamingo, Bugsy Siegel's desert dream erected in 1946, you're five years too late.

I'll give you some hints. It's a hotel with a dude ranch theme, although I know that only from reading old newspapers. You can search every cornice and facade, and walk every inch of the casino floor, and fail to find evidence of any western theme in the hotel that invented the around-the-clock "chuck wagon," which would later become the bargain buffet offered by all Vegas casinos.

One of the sad things about all Vegas hotels, in fact, is that, as time passes, the original theme can't sustain itself. Even at the Luxor, which opened in 1993, the River Nile canal is already gone and the Karnak Kiosk sells cheap Indian jewelry. At the Sahara, which used an Egyptian theme 41 years before the Luxor, there's just a hint of the original motif, suggested by Arabic-style signage and a cartoonish camel sculpture at the entrance to the Caravan Coffee Shop. Otherwise, there's just a "commodifiable" sameness to these places, to use the term favored by Mandalay Bay president Glenn Schaefer.

I look out the window of my room in this most historic of casinos, toward the Metropolitan Las Vegas Communications Center across the street. It's a huge windowless bunker flanked by some boarded-up shops. Homeless guys loiter on the street.

I walk down a hallway carpeted in a hue of dark purple that can't cover up all the cigarette burns and stains accumulated over the years. An old man with no customers waits behind a glass door that announces "BARBER SHOP."

There's no elevator, so I walk down to the casino, where the morning denizens have begun to stir. Who are these people who sit in front of a nickel slot machine at 9 a.m.? They're mostly damaged in one way or another, using walkers or canes or wheelchairs, listing to one side, alone for the most part. If they talk, it's to someone they know only from the casino. The breakfast special is $1.99, and to get a crack at it I stand in what could easily be mistaken for an unemployment line.

Give up yet?

This is the fabled El Cortez, the pride and joy of Los Angeles hotel builder Marion Hicks, who opened it in 1941. My $23-a-night room is in the oldest original casino building in the country.

The El Cortez is what set off the casino dude-ranch boom. The year after Hicks built it, one of his competitors built El Rancho Vegas on the Strip and used the same dude ranch theme. By 1943 there was also The Last Frontier, two miles south of El Rancho Vegas, where a Texas theater owner named R.E. Griffith created "The Early West in Modern Splendor," the most elaborate of all the dude resorts, with its famous "Ramona Room," featuring stone carved and inlaid by the Zuni Indians.

There are still a few cartoon cowboys and Indians around Vegas today, but no one is building dude ranches anymore. The El Cortez was the first hotel Bugsy Siegel bought into when he arrived in Vegas. You would expect it to be a building with many secrets, except that all the keepers of the secrets are long dead. To the thousands of people who pass by it each day, it's just a hideous brown monstrosity full of street people. Only a certain type of local would even venture inside.

As recently as 1994, all of Fremont Street looked like the El Cortez--a seedy warren of pawn shops and slots joints and cheap souvenir stores folded in among the famous hotels like the Golden Nugget (owned at the time by Steve Wynn's Mirage Resorts), the Fremont, the Horseshoe, and the Las Vegas Club.

When Steve Wynn asked all the downtown casino owners to meet in 1994 and plan their future, it wasn't to "brainstorm." It was a matter of survival. At one of the early meetings, old-style casino owners like Jackie Gaughan, Sam Boyd, and Jack Binion sat in a conference room and watched a multi-media presentation while Wynn waxed ecstatic about his plan to line Fremont Street with palm trees and put in a series of water attractions to create tourist interest.

After he finished, he asked all the old-timers for their opinions. Jack Binion went last, and in his painfully slow Texas drawl, he said, "Steve, the only thing I'm thinking is that a week ago you couldn't have gotten the men in this room to put up fifty dollars for the Second Coming of Christ. Now you're wanting to spend 50 million dollars to put a river down the middle of Fremont Street. The way I look at it, the baby's at the bottom of the swimming pool, and you're talking about sending him to Harvard."

Nevertheless, Wynn eventually got men who had never agreed on anything to fund and build the Fremont Street Experience, which sounds like a San Francisco rock band, circa 1968, but is actually a pedestrian mall covered by a light canopy that features animated special effects once an hour.

Even after it opened, though the casinos continued to lose business--the locals deserted downtown for the cleaner, snazzier suburban casinos, with their food courts and cineplexes--but the decline was finally reversed in the year 2000, when downtown showed a 2 per cent gain over 1999. Unfortunately, the El Cortez was left out of the loop, standing two blocks past the end of the canopy, where the wasteland of derelict motels on the old Boulder Highway begins.

Still, the jury is still out as to whether the special- effects canopy helped or hurt the downtown business. The hotel owners say it was definitely a good thing, but some of the other merchants aren't so sure.

"What did you think of the Fremont Street Experience?" asks Jim Gish with a sneer in his voice. I'm sampling vodka with the co-owner of the Girls of Glitter Gulch topless bar, one of the few Fremont Street businesses that chose not to participate in the project. "Cartoons! It's a cartoon show. Is that Vegas? That's not Vegas. That's not why people come to downtown Vegas."

Nearby a zaftig blonde slides down onto her back and arches her leg over the head of a customer. "Now that is Vegas."

A day later I'm in Mayor Oscar Goodman's office and we're both standing by his 10th-floor window, looking toward Fremont Street.

"You see that land over behind the Union Plaza?"

Goodman points to a dusty brown wasteland bounded by freeways and the Union Pacific railroad tracks.

"We have control of that now. We made a deal with the railroad. We have the opportunity of no other city in the world, to totally design and control 61 acres right in the heart of the city. You ask me if there's hope for downtown. Not only is there hope for downtown. Downtown is on the verge of a renaissance explosion. We'll have residential development downtown. I would advise you to buy some property there now, because it's going to be one of the best places to live in Las Vegas. I want to bring part of the Smithsonian Institution's permanent collection to downtown. My office is having discussions with them now. Among other things we're considering are stadia, arts centers, a biomedical center, a medical research facility. And that land will eventually be the heart and soul of this entire southern Nevada region."

I remark that Las Vegas doesn't seem too sentimental about efforts to preserve Fremont Street.

"The Fremont Street Experience was a necessity to attract people down there," says Goodman. "The old Las Vegas loved old Fremont Street. I moved here in 1964 and Fremont Street was the place to be. But it's a different city now. Las Vegas is changing in light-years every day now."

The mayor continues to talk. He wants to tell me all about Wole Soyinka, the Nobel Prize winning playwright who moved to Las Vegas from Nigeria as part of the city's "asylum" program, but I'm still looking down on the canopy over Fremont Street. In the daytime it looks unfinished and grotesque, like the metal cast doctors use after they put a pin through a broken bone. Nothing can grow inside there. Nothing outside of the canopy can survive. From this vantage point, the gallant gambling halls of the thirties and forties seem to have crapped out.

The Fremont Street Experience, it seems to me, has ossified the place, like the second childhood that comes just before death. There may be future development in downtown Vegas, and it may end up all bright and shiny and full of pedestrian malls, and then it will be . . . just like every other downtown shopping area in America.

The most famous sign on Fremont Street is Vegas Vic, the waving neon cowboy that sat atop the Pioneer Casino and was designed to welcome tourists arriving on the Boulder Highway. The Pioneer is long gone. Vegas Vic still waves, but if you drive in on the Boulder Highway, you can't see him because he's under the canopy. It doesn't matter anyway, though. He sits atop an empty building.

© Copyright 2002 United Press International and Joe Bob Briggs

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