Las Vegas: The Goin' Gets-a-movin'
The New Frontier resort hotel gained acceptance not only in the West, but in the East as well.
For Las Vegans, the resort hotel served as a unit by which to measure the city's fantastic growth.
For other Americans, it served as a travel destination, as the scene of the vacation experience in southern Nevada, and as a glimpse of tomorrow.
Like previous additions to the American culture of gambling, the Strip hotel reflected the particular western society in which it developed.
Its predecessor in Las Vegas, the downtown casino, had blended certain aspects of modern far western culture with remnants from the old West to produce a resort establishment devoted single-mindedly to gambling.
The Strip hotel continued to offer gambling above all else to visitors, but because it consolidated so many components of Southern California culture, it also conveyed to its patrons a distinctive and new mode of living.
In the roadtown district south of the city limits, futuristic styles root at the outset of postwar development and dominated the shape of the emerging resort district.
As a source of new ways of life, Southern California reached its peak during the postwar period. The region had already pioneered the new cultural forms suggested by automobiles, moving pictures, and suburban housing.
Now it led the nation in adapting to the social conditions of post-industrialism as well. Californians explored the shifting relationship between work and play, the changing role of the individual in mass society, and the novel dimensions of post-war affluence.
Leisure activities placed the new way of life into sharp focus for the nation because many of Californians' cultural innovations during the twentieth century converged to generate distinctive forms of recreation.
The hotel-casinos of the Las Vegas Strip comprised one prominent playground where a most modern culture came to be distilled and dispensed for the entire country.
The Las Vegas blend of mobility, affluence, risk taking, and individualism that tourists encountered in the roadtown gambling district was promoted and marketed as an industrial commodity.
Casino gambling grew into an enormous business that mass-produced vacation experiences for average people in much the same fashion that Hollywood movie-makers created pictures of widespread consumption.
Industrial methods of production increasingly shaped the Strip hotel as a cultural form and defined the boundaries of the future as embodied in the urban resort; they also enabled large numbers of tourists to act as new frontiersmen in Las Vegas.
To a generation less burdened with doubts about gaming, Las Vegas offered a permissive atmosphere in which people freely took chances without seeming to suffer injury.
The futuristic Strip captured the imaginations of Americans. The resort city presented to visitors, in packages of three days and two nights, the attitudes and leisure of tomorrow.
To a nation preoccupied with affluence and technology, roadtown Las Vegas appeared as a city designed for comfort and and convenience.