Wanderlust: A History of Walking (42 page)

Wandering and gambling have some things in common; they are both activities in which anticipation can be more delicious than arrival, desire more reliable than satisfaction. To put one foot in front of one another or one's cards on the table is to entertain chance, but gambling has become a highly predictable science for the casinos, and they and the law enforcement of Las Vegas are trying to control the odds on walking down the Strip too. The Strip is a true boulevard. It is
exposed to the weather, open to its surroundings, a public space in which those glorious freedoms granted by the First Amendment can be exercised, but a mighty effort is being made to take them away, so that the Strip will instead be a sort of amusement park or mall, a space in which we can be consumers but not citizens. Next to the Frontier is the Fashion Show Shopping Center, where leafletters hang out together, forming one of the Strip's many subcultures. Many are undocumented Central Americans, Amie Williams said, and the leaflets most often pertain to sex (though Vegas has a huge sex industry, customers are sought largely by advertisements, not by street hustling; the dozens of clusters of newsstands along the Strip contain very few newspapers and a veritable library of brochures, cards, and leaflets with color photographs advertising an army of “private dancers” and “escort services”). Since the women themselves are largely invisible, the visibility of the ads has come under assault. The county passed an ordinance making “off-premises canvassing” in the “resort district” a misdemeanor. The director of the Nevada outpost of the American Civil Liberties Union, Gary Peck, spoke to me of “the almost transparent paradox that Vegas markets itself as anything goes—sex, alcohol, gambling—and on the other hand has this almost obsessive attempt at thorough control of public space, advertising on billboards, in the airport, panhandling, free speech.” The ACLU's fight over the handbill ordinance had reached the Federal Court of Appeals, and other issues kept cropping up. Earlier that year, petition-gathers were harassed and a pastor and four companions were arrested for proselytizing in the Fremont Street Experience on charges of “blocking a sidewalk,” though the now-pedestrian arcade is one vast sidewalk it would take dozens to obstruct.

The casinos and the county, Peck told me, are trying to privatize the very sidewalks, to give themselves more muscle for prosecuting or removing anyone engaging in First Amendment activities—speaking about religion, sex, politics, economics—or otherwise ruffling the smooth experience visitors are supposed to have (similarly, Tucson has recently looked into privatizing sidewalks by leasing them for one dollar to businesses, to allow them to drive out the homeless). Peck worries that if they succeed in taking away the ancient “freedom of the city” at the sidewalk level, it will set a precedent for the rest of the country, malling what were once genuine public spaces, making cities into theme parks. “The theme park,” writes Michael Sorkin, “presents its happy regulated version of pleasure—all those artfully hoodwinking forms—as a substitute for the democratic urban
realm, and it does so appealingly by stripping troubled urbanity of its sting, of the presence of the poor, of crime, of dirt, of work.” The Mirage has already posted a little sign on one of its lawns: “This sidewalk is the private property of the Mirage Casino Hotel upon which an easement has been granted to facilitate pedestrian movement. Anyone found loitering or otherwise impeding pedestrian movement is subject to arrest for trespass,” and signs up and down the strip say, “Resort District: No Obstructive Uses Permitted on Public Sidewalks.” The signs are there not to protect the freedom of movement of pedestrians, but to restrict what those pedestrians can do or see.

I was hot and weary from the four miles or so I'd gone from Fremont Street, for it was a warm day and the air was stale with exhaust. Distance is deceptive on the Strip: the major intersections are about a mile apart, but the new casinos with their twenty-or-thirty-story hotel towers tend to look closer because their scale doesn't register. Treasure Island is the first of the new theme-park casinos one reaches from the north, and one of the most fantastic—named not after a place or period like the rest, but after a boys' book about pirate life in the South Seas. With a facade of fake rock and picturesque building fronts behind its lagoon of palm trees and pirate ships, it resembles a hotel-resort version of Disneyland's Pirates of the Caribbean ride. But it was the adjoining Mirage that invented the pedestrian spectacle in 1989, with its volcano that erupts every fifteen minutes after dark, to the delight of gathered crowds. When Treasure Island opened in 1993, it upstaged the volcano with a full-fledged pirate battle climaxing with the sinking of a ship—but the battle only takes place a few times a day.

The authors of
Learning from Las Vegas
long ago groused that “the Beautification Committee would continue to recommend turning the Strip into a western Champs-Elysées, obscuring the signs with trees and raising the humidity with giant fountains.” The fountains have arrived, and the vast sheets of water fronting the Mirage and Treasure Island are dwarfed by the eight-acre lake at Bellagio, down where the Dunes used to be, across Flamingo Road from Caesars Palace. Together these four casinos make something altogether new and surprisingly old-fashioned, a wild hybrid of the formal garden and the pleasure garden spread out along a public thoroughfare. The Mirage's volcano buried the old Vegas as decisively as Vesuvius did Pompeii, changing architecture and audiences together. The
fountains are everywhere, and it
is
a kind of western Champs-Élysées, in that walking to look at the architecture and the other walkers has become a pastime. The Strip is replacing its neon-go-go Americana futurama vision with Europe, a fun pop-culture version of Europe, a Europe of architectural greatest hits and boulevardiers in shorts and T-shirts. Is there anything less peculiar about setting miniature Italian and Roman temples and bridges in English gardens than in putting up gargantuan ones in the desert, in building volcanoes in eighteenth-century gardens such as Wörlitz in Germany than on boulevards in Nevada? Caesars Palace, with its dark green cypresses, fountains, and classical statuary out front, calls up many of the elements of the formal garden, which was itself an Italian extension of Roman practices adapted by the French, Dutch, and English. Bellagio, with its frontage of fountains, recalls Versailles, whose scale was a demonstration of wealth, power, and triumph over nature. These places are mutant reprises of the landscapes in which walking as scenic pleasure was developed. Vegas has become the successor to Vauxhall, Ranelagh, Tivoli, and all the other pleasure gardens of the past, a place where the unstructured pleasures of walking and looking mingle with highly organized shows (stages for music, theater, and pantomimes were an important part of pleasure gardens, as were areas to dance, eat, drink, and sit). As a Vegas promoter might say, the garden is making a comeback, crossbred with the boulevard, and with them comes pedestrian life.

All the efforts to control who strolls and how suggest that walking may in some way still be subversive. At least it subverts the ideals of entirely privatized space and controlled crowds, and it provides entertainment in which nothing is spent or consumed. Though walking may be an inadvertent side effect of gambling—after all, the casino facades weren't built out of public-spiritedness—the Strip is now a place to walk. And after all, Paris's Champs-Élysées also belongs to tourists and foreigners nowadays, strolling, shopping, eating, drinking, and enjoying the sights. New pedestrian overpasses eliminate the intersection of people and cars where Flamingo Road crosses the Strip, and they are handsome bridges giving some of the best views around. But these bridges are entered and exited from within the casinos, so there may come a time when only the well-dressed can cross the street safely here, and the rabble will have to take their chances with the cars or make a long detour. The Strip is not the Champs-Élysées reborn for other reasons too; it lacks the perfect straightness Le Nôtre gave the older
road, the straightness that lets you see far into the distance. It bends and bulges, though there are always the cross-streets—and the bridge over Flamingo Road between Bellagio and Caesars provided the best view yet of the desert to the west and Red Rocks. From the other bridge, the one over the Strip from Bellagio to Bally's, I could see—Paris! I had forgotten that a Paris casino was under construction, but there rising out of the dusty soil of the Mojave like an urban mirage, a flâneur's apparition, was the Eiffel Tower, only half finished and half scale but already aggressively straddling what looked like a stumpy Louvre with the Arc de Triomphe jostling it in an antigeographic jumble of architectural greatest hits.

Of course Vegas is reinventing not only the garden, but the city: New York, New York is just down the road from Bellagio, the Tokyo-homage Imperial Palace is up the street, and a much older version of San Francisco—the Barbary Coast—faces Caesars. The 1996 New York, New York is, like the Paris casino, a cluster of famous features; inside is a funny little maze of streets made to look like various Manhattan neighborhoods, complete with street signs, shops (of which only the souvenir and food shops are real, as I found when I foolishly lunged for a bookstore), air conditioners jutting out third-floor windows, and even a graffiti corner—but, of course, without the variety, productive life, dangers, and possibilities of real urban life. Fronted by a Statue of Liberty welcoming gamblers rather than huddled masses yearning to be free, New York, New York is a walk-through souvenir of the city. No longer pocket-size and portable but a destination in itself, it performs a souvenir's function: recalling a few pleasant and reassuringly familiar aspects of a complicated place. I ate a late lunch in New York, New York and drank three pints of water to replenish what had evaporated from me in the desert aridity of my all-day walk.

Back on the boulevard, a young woman from Hong Kong asked me to take a picture of her with the Statue of Liberty behind her and then with the huge golden MGM lion across the street, and she looked ecstatic in both shots. Fat people and thin people, people in baggy shorts and in sleek dresses, a few children and a lot of old people streamed around us, and I handed the camera back and continued south with the crowd, to the last station on these stations of the odds, the Luxor, whose pyramid shape and sphinx say ancient Egypt, but whose shiny glass on which lasers play at night says technology. The newlyweds I had seen before were there in the entryway: she had laid aside her coat and purse to pose for his camera in front of one of the mock-Egyptian statues. I wondered
about them, about why they had chosen to spend the first hours of their honeymoon strolling the Strip, about what past they brought to this encounter with global fantasy filtered through the Nevada desert's climate and gambling's economy. Who am I to say that because these people who streamed by to my right and my left were Las Vegas tourists they did not have other lives: that this English couple might not take their next vacation in the Lake District, that the old French couple might not live in Paris or near Plum Village where the Vietnamese Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh teaches walking meditation, that the African-Americans might not have marched in Selma as children, that the beggar in a wheelchair could not have been hit by a car in New Orleans, that the bride and groom might not be Japanese climbers of Mount Fuji, Chinese descendants of mountain hermits, southern Californian executives with treadmills at home, that this Guatemalan handing out helicopter-ride coupons might not walk the stations of the cross in her church or once have promenaded the plaza in her hometown, that bartender going to work might not have gone on the AFL-CIO march across the desert? The history of walking is as expansive as human history, and the most attractive thing about this pedestrian oasis in the middle of suburban blight in the middle of a great desert expanse is that it hints at that history's breadth—not in its fake Rome and Tokyo, but in its Italian and Japanese tourists.

Las Vegas suggests that the thirst for places, for cities and gardens and wilderness, is unslaked, that people will still seek out the experience of wandering about in the open air to examine the architecture, the spectacles, and the stuff for sale, will still hanker after surprises and strangers. That the city as a whole is one of the most pedestrian-unfriendly places in the world suggests something of the problems to be faced, but that its attraction is a pedestrian oasis suggests the possibility of recovering the spaces in which walking is viable. That the space may be privatized to make the liberties of walking, speaking, and demonstrating illegal suggests that the United States is facing as serious a battle over rights-of-way as did English ramblers half a century ago, though this time the struggle is over urban, not rural, space. Equally scary is the widespread willingness to accept simulations of real places, for just as these simulations usually forbid the full exercise of civil liberties, so they banish the full spectrum of sights, encounters, experiences, that might provoke a poet, a cultural critic, a social reformer, a street photographer.

But the world gets better at the same time it gets worse. Vegas is not an
anomaly but an intensification of mainstream culture, and walking will survive outside that mainstream and sometimes reenter it. When the automotive strip and suburb were being developed in the decades after World War II, Martin Luther King was studying Gandhi and reinventing Christian pilgrimage as something politically powerful at one edge of this continent, while at the other Gary Snyder was studying Taoist sages and walking meditation and rethinking the relationship between spirituality and environmentalism. At present, space in which to walk is being defended and sometimes enlarged by pedestrian activist groups springing up in cities across the United States, from Feet First in Seattle and Atlanta's PEDS to Philly Walks and Walk Austin, by the incendiary British-based Reclaim the Streets, by older organizations like the Ramblers' Association and other British insurrections for walking and access, and by pedestrian-favoring urban redesign from Amsterdam to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Walking traditions are maintained by the resurgence of the foot pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain and the thriving one in Chimayó, New Mexico, the growing popularity of climbing and mountaineering, the artists working with walking as a medium and the writers with it as a means, the spread of Buddhism with its practices of walking meditation and circumambulating mountains, the newfound secular and religious enthusiasm for labyrinths and mazes. . . .