Outrage Over the Fabulous Las Vegas Sign Getting Tagged

All around the world, it seems, people are outraged over the tagging of the Fabulous Las Vegas Sign.  Let us know what you think!

From the Las Vegas Sun:

Someone used a red Sharpie to scribble a few letters on a sign and the town went nuts. This was not just any sign. This one said, “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas.”

Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman, whose city does not technically include the sign and who has previously called for cutting off the thumbs of vandals, demanded decapitation.

The reader comments on the Sun’s Web site seethed with anger. Some blamed hippies. Others, the media. There were calls embracing Mayor Goodman’s earlier, more moderate call for merely cutting off vandals’ thumbs. One commenter called for flogging, another caning. Multiple people said the mob would never have allowed this. Still others called for the all-seeing eye of Big Brother.

“I am tired of the vandalism, hit & run accidents, and crime that goes on here,” a commenter with the moniker “henderson” wrote. “I want surveillance cameras everywhere catching criminals. These people do not deserve the ‘privacy’ to commit criminal acts.”

What is it about this sign? After all, graffiti is fairly common and almost nobody likes it, but it rarely inspires calls for blood-drenched vengeance or state surveillance. And this is Las Vegas. We’re not exactly known for civic pride, community involvement, public spiritedness, sentimentality or even waving at our neighbors. And yet it seems there is one enormous exception.

What is it about this sign?

The sign was created in 1959 by Betty Willis, a designer at Western Neon. The star-topped diamond, lit up with atomic-age glitz, was erected to welcome Southern Californians driving in on Highway 91, with the seven letters of “welcome” spelled out in seven silver dollars, a nod to the state’s silver mining legacy and the slot machines we hoped the tourists would play.

“I remember coming here with my family in the 1960s and driving past that sign. It was like, ‘Wow. Here we are,’ ” says Dorothy Wright, a program administrator for Clark County’s Parks and Recreation Department who led the successful drive to have the sign listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

The sign is one of the world’s most recognizable icons, appearing in ads and on T-shirts, coffee mugs, desktop replicas and even snow globes. Even though it’s not on the route into town anymore, thousands of tourists pose in front of it every year. Before the county put in a $400,000 parking lot last year, people daily risked injury or death to run across Las Vegas Boulevard to be seen with the sign.

Yet for all of the millions of visitors, the sign seems to have gone 50 years without any serious vandalism. Until last weekend.

“In that sense, it’s a violation of a sacred icon,” says Patrick Gaffey, a cultural program supervisor for Clark County who oversees public art.

If anything, it’s more an icon for locals than for tourists. Because while nearly everything in town has been torn down, blown up and rebuilt in the past 50 years, the sign has not. In a city of change, the sign has permanence. More than that, unlike the casinos that rise and fall, the sign is a civic object. Among all its charms, its biggest may be as simple as this: It’s ours.

And it’s ours in a very peculiar way. Unlike the Hollywood sign, which stands for an industry and glamour, or the Golden Gate Bridge, which stands for a feat of tremendous engineering, or the Statue of Liberty, which stands for freedom, the Fabulous Las Vegas sign stands for tourism, plain and simple.

That doesn’t diminish the sign. In this town, there is nothing more important that the sign could stand for.

“It means so much to everyone. The inter-connectedness between tourism and the rest of the city is so much more profound here than in almost any other city in the world,” says Alan Feldman, senior vice president of public affairs at MGM Mirage.

It’s one of the first things you notice when you move here: People talk about tourism. Not in a can-you-believe-the-traffic, can-you-believe-their-clothes kind of way, either. We talk about occupancy rates, room prices and the monthly gaming take. We’re interested because if the tourism machine throws a cog, we’re the ones who bleed.

The Fabulous Las Vegas sign is our representative on the Strip. It’s us, welcoming the tourists in, telling them to have fun, enjoy the bright lights and leave their money when they’re done. Please.

So, to have the sign defaced now, when the tourists aren’t spending and we’re hurting? It’s like being kicked when we’re down.

To get some perspective on this, we tried to get in touch with Betty Willis herself, through her daughter Marjorie Holland. It turns out, Holland had talked to her mother about the assault on the sign.

“I told her this morning, when it was on the news, and she said, ‘What’s this world coming to?’ ”

The graffitti was removed from the sign yesterday (Tuesday) by its owner, Young Electric Sign Company.

It cost about $500 to return the sign to its sparkling facade.

Arson Experts Have Questions about the Moulin Rouge fire

It certainly sounded like one of those "fires of suspicious nature" that plague empty, historic buildings in Las Vegas.  So we are not surprised that Arson investigators have some questions about the fire that finally destroyed the historic Moulin Rouge Hotel two months ago.

From the Las Vegas Sun:

For city residents, the four-alarm fire at the Moulin Rouge in May was a civic misfortune, the second major blaze to devastate the site since the iconic downtown hotel opened in 1955.

For Las Vegas arson investigators, who have confirmed that the fire was set by human hands though not necessarily intentionally, the blaze presents a host of facts to explore.

No allegations of arson have been made by city investigators — and may never be. In their only public statement since the May 6 fire, investigators last month confirmed “there was human involvement regarding the heat source” — though they do not yet know whether it was intentional or accidental.

“Neither arson or cooking by vagrants could be eliminated, so the investigation is ongoing,” according to a city spokeswoman.

The Moulin Rouge’s new owners assumed control of the property one day before the fire, after the former owners went bankrupt and the property was foreclosed upon. The Moulin Rouge sign — the only remaining valuable vestige of the historic casino — was carted off to the Neon Boneyard one week before the blaze.

The Moulin Rouge, open for a period of months in 1955, was the first integrated casino in Las Vegas. It was the place where several community leaders, including former Las Vegas Sun Publisher Hank Greenspun, met in 1960 and agreed to end segregation on the Strip.

The property’s former owner, the Moulin Rouge Development Corp., had sold the City Council last August on its plans to develop a spacious casino and 41-story hotel on the Bonanza Road site. Before demolishing the site’s existing structure, the owners faced a large bill for removing asbestos from the property. The fire cut into that cost considerably.

Two arson experts outside of Nevada who were interviewed by the Las Vegas Sun after they familiarized themselves with news accounts and city news releases about the fire say the circumstances, taken together, raise questions investigators want to explore.

“These are all what we call major red flags,” said Nicholas Palumbo, a nationally certified fire investigator based in New Jersey. “You look at these things and you have to ask: Are they all just coincidences?”

City spokeswoman Diana Paul said no other questions about the fire, or the probe being led by Las Vegas Fire & Rescue arson investigators, will be answered until the investigation is complete. The statute of limitations for arson in Nevada is four years, she said.

More than 100 firefighters took over two hours to quell the blaze. Plumes of dark gray smoke could be seen for miles. No one was injured.

A local fire investigator from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms was on the scene, the ATF confirmed, though local fire officials decided not to call in the agency’s national response team to assist with the probe.

(ATF national response teams have been called to at least three Southern Nevada fires in recent years, including the 2003 fire at the Moulin Rouge.)

As firefighters were finishing their task, the structure was demolished. According to a city news release, the decision to demolish what remained of the building was made by the city manager and fire chief based on an ordinance that allows the city to abate a hazard — in this case, tear down a smoldering building — if “the condition of a property constitutes an imminent hazard.”

According to the release, representatives of the group that had lost ownership control of the property the day before, the Moulin Rouge Development Corp., were on the scene and had a contractor ready to conduct the demolition.

Despite the fact that the group no longer owned the property, the city gave the company the OK to tear it down. The city said arson investigators had finished their work at the site before the demolition.

The Moulin Rouge Development Corp., which purchased the property in 2004, filed for bankruptcy in February with $40million in debt, despite receiving a $24million loan from Seattle-based lender Olympic Coast Investment Inc. for a new hotel on the site.

The week before the fire the property was put up for auction but there were no bidders, sources familiar with the process said. On May 5, Olympic Coast took ownership of the 15-acre site, which also includes two former apartment complexes and 60 condominium units.

Olympic Coast’s president, John Hoss, visited his new property while the fire was still being doused.

“The timing is a little odd,” Hoss told a Las Vegas Sun reporter at the time. “It’s a weird coincidence. It’s certainly odd.”

In a more recent telephone interview, Hoss said he had no idea how the fire started.

He said his group is attempting to sell the property — which still has gaming development rights attached — for more than $25million, and that parties have expressed interest. A sale could be announced soon, he said.

Hoss said there was an insurance policy in place when Olympic Coast took ownership. He declined to say how much the property was insured for, other than that it was in the single-digit millions of dollars. But he said he’s asking insurers for only $100,000 to cover the cost of the fire’s clean-up.

Both Hoss and the city’s neighborhood response division manager, Devin Smith, confirmed that all four properties are or were laden with asbestos, and that the city has been demanding it be cleaned up at a cost of $1.2million. That cost is now hundreds of thousands of dollars less because it is cheaper to clean up asbestos from a fire site than to remove asbestos from an existing structure, Smith said.

Palumbo, the fire investigator, and Patrick Andler, a Phoenix-based certified fire instructor who has investigated more than 4,000 fires, say the city may have erred by allowing the building to be demolished so soon after most of the fire had been doused.

Investigators would have had a better shot at determining the precise origin of the fire — and what may have caused it and who may have started it — if the structure had been left intact, they said.

“Fire investigation is a process of elimination,” Andler said. Investigators need to be able to look at every single room to determine which one was the source of the fire. And then they need to have access to that room to search for debris.

Neither the three principals of the Moulin Rouge Development Corp., Chauncey Moore, Dale Scott and Los Angeles attorney Rod Bickerstaff, nor the group’s former public relations consultant, Jayson Bernstein, could not be reached for comment.

David Peter, the president of Republic Urban Properties, a Virginia group that had announced it would invest up to $1billion to develop the site — said he has washed his hands of his investment and given up on seeing a return on the money that his group had poured into the project. “We’ve written it off,” he said.

Harry Reid Backs Wrong High Speed Train to Vegas

Having just driven from Southern California to Las Vegas (and back), you would think that the idea of a high speed train would excite those of us who do the 4.5 hour drive on a regular basis.  And the idea of a high speed train does interest me. 

Just not the one that Sen. Harry Reid is backing.  As reported here a few months ago, a battle is brewing over two companies that want to bring high-speed rail to Southern Nevada.  The DesertXpress is the maglev train that would go from Anaheim to Las Vegas.  You could leave Las Vegas and be at Disneyland without having to endure the notorious (and not getting any better) Southern California traffic jams.  If you wanted to go to Los Angeles, you'd take one of the light-rail trains to Union Station.  They have plans for a terminus in Palmdale to accomodate those in the high desert that want to go to Las Vegas.

The other high-speed train, the one that Sen. Reid is backing, would go from Victorville to Las Vegas.  Yes, you read that right.  Victorville.  People in Southern California would have to drive to Victorville to take advantage of the train.  And people visiting from Las Vegas, would have to rent a car in Victorville and drive into Los Angeles.

The worst part of the trip is usually getting through Southern California traffic just to get to Victorville.  After that, the trip is usually less aggravating.  The idea that the freeways in Southern California are only a problem during rush hour is an urban legend.  About the only time the freeways aren't jammed are in the wee hours of the morning.

It is about 2.5 hours from Victorville to downtown Los Angeles.  And it usually bumper to bumper for a good portion of that drive.  And most people going to Los Angeles aren't staying downtown, so just getting to Downtown Los Angeles, still means you have more driving (and more sitting in traffic) to do.

So, we are scratching our heads over Sen. Reid's backing of a high-speed train that does not connect Southern California to Las Vegas but instead only goes part of the way.

It reminds us of the hype around the Las Vegas Monorail and we all know what a boon-doggle that became.

Let us know what you think!  Would you take a train to Victorville?

From our friends at the Las Vegas Sun:

A high-speed train should be in place in 2012 that links Las Vegas and Southern California.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid today announced that plans are moving ahead for the DesertXpress train to Victorville, which is a private project. Reid had thrown his support behind the project, saying it had a better chance of getting built than an alternative maglev option that would have linked Las Vegas and Anaheim.

Officials hope to break ground in the first quarter of next year, with the project expected to be completed two years later.

As a private project, DesertXpress has insisted it has no interest in competing for $8 billion in federal recovery money — although more recently its backers said they may seek federal loans to help finance the $5 billion project.

Reid said today that plans are in place to link the project with California’s north-south trunk line "soon after" the Victorville project is complete, although no specific timeline is in place. The $45 billion trunk-line project links San Francisco and Southern California.

DesertXpress envisions a spur linking its Victorville stop to the California train’s Palmdale station, about 50 miles west. The Sun reported today that the U.S. Transportation secretary would announce the designation of a federal high-speed-rail corridor between Las Vegas and Southern California.

The one-way fare between Las Vegas and Southern California would be about $50.

DesertXpress is a private enterprise currently unaffiliated with a state agency.

"Las Vegas: 1905-1965" Makes Great Summer Reading!

We've got copies!

Discover the real history of Las Vegas!

This is the book I wrote on the history of Las Vegas with lots of postcards, some rare and one of kind.  Makes for great reading this summer!!

If you are flying to Vegas this summer or need a book to read while poolside, this is it.  The story of Las Vegas told through postcard images.  Images that are part of our collective memory, images that you may never have seen before, a look at Las Vegas beyond the neon and the glitter.

In short, the real history of Las Vegas as you've never experienced.

The book covers the history of Las Vegas from 1905 to 1965 and besides lots of interesting history about the Strip and the various original hotels, there's lots of history on the Roadside Architecture, the Motels, the Post-War era,and most of all, the Community.

Discover the real history of your favorite vacation spot or the place you call home!

It's a fun-filled book packed with info and lots of images of the Las Vegas you love and miss.

I've got copies of the book for sale and I'll autograph them as well!

http://www.classiclasvegas.com/coolstuff/coolstuff.htm

So, head on over and order your copy today!

A portion of the sales goes toward maintaining this blog and our historical preservation work so it's for a worthy cause!