by Timothy Egan
The other Vegas legacy of Howard Hughes was Summerlin, a walled enclave of pumped-up homes northwest of the Strip, twenty-six thousand acres, all of it sealed from the world of random encounters. Summerlin will approach 200,000 people soon, a development where everything from climate to house colors is strictly regulated. When Hughes finally left, he departed Las Vegas as he had arrived, under cover of darkness. In nine years, the drapes of his suite were never opened.
The town had It’s first serious water shortage in the late 1940s. For a time, no water flowed from faucets at Las Vegas Hospital. People panicked. Even lawn-watering was banned. But this could not stand. “Whiskey is for drinking,” Mark Twain said about the West. “Water is for fighting over.” Las Vegas dipped a straw into Lake Mead, the reservoir created by Hoover Dam, the water that buried Paiute ruins and a stone-walled Mormon fort, and the good times rolled again. Water use shot up to eight hundred gallons a person per day—four times as much as Los Angeles. Some elite architects, Robert Venturi among them, pronounced the city fabulous. It was anything goes, alive, electric, original, American! It was the frontier of urbanism. Forget those prune-faced Puritans and their miserable City on a Hill. Forget Wallace Stegner’s civilization to match the setting. Forget Edward Abbeys apocalyptic fear of a bloated urban monster rising in the desert, a cancer of melanomas. Here was the new century city dream. Lakes were created on alkaline flats. Rivers ran through neighborhoods built on sand. The rain forest grew in the Mirage. By the early 1990s, a new home—red-roof tiled, with white stucco coat and a rug of Kentucky bluegrass out back—was rising every hour.
The population doubled in ten years, until more than a million people lived in the valley. They pushed out toward the Spring Mountains one way and Lake Mead the other, with inflatable neighborhoods named Mariners Cove, Harbour Vista, Green Valley, Desert Creek, Shoreline Estates. The lords of such estates swam in artificial lakes and lounged on artificial lawns. The murder rate rose to the highest in the West—increasing while the rest of the country’s violent crime statistics were going down—but most newcomers were safely ensconced in communities that were “gated and guarded,” as the signs said. And a brown cloud took up residence over the valley, giving Las Vegas the worst air in America outside Los Angeles and Phoenix. But in the desert who wants to go outside anyway? They laughed at Howard Hughes in his hermetically sealed room, growing his nails until they curled over his hands like wax from a dripping candle, living in a home devoid of daylight or contact with any human other than a heavily screened sycophant. But they flocked to the neighborhoods built to match his neuroses.
Could this, the West’s gift to city-building, be the height of American urban evolution? the Stegner vision unfettered by anything but market forces, a million and a half people living in a place not unlike a poorly planned lunar colony? It was not a city to match the setting, but a city to defy the setting.
As long as the Colorado River poured through turbines at Hoover Dam, there would be enough electricity to keep Vegas at seventy-two degrees, year-round. And as long as the pumps drew from the deepest cellar of the Mojave and the tub behind sixty stories of concrete at Hoover Dam, there would be enough water to create the rain forest in Nevada. So, why worry? Unlike Arizona, which requires developers to show proof of a hundred-year water supply before they can go ahead with a project, Nevada has no such restrictions. You want water? Promise it to people fleeing the exurbs of Southern California, and the city will deliver, somehow. Anything to keep the one-house-per-hour construction train moving on time, to keep the Hudson River knockoff in front of the Statue of Liberty knockoff flowing, to keep the Nile inside the Luxor moving, to keep Mariners Cove from looking like the desert. The underground reservoir that gave birth to the artesian oasis was pumped for every precious drop, and any gallon that could legally be taken from the Colorado River was used. Steve Wynn built his boiling waterfall in front of the Mirage and then went one better next door, at Treasure Island, creating a Caribbean moat. Then he blew up the Dunes for Bellagio, named for the most beautiful small town in all of Europe, on the shores of Lake Como. “If you want to make money in a casino,” Wynn said, “own one.” Down the Strip, Paris started to rise, the City of Light without rude waiters or bidets in every room. And in place of the Sands would be the biggest hydro-dream, a $2-billion knockoff of Venice—the city of canals.
As a fantasy, it is all wonderful, a great escape. What’s not to like? A virtual world within a few square miles. Like me, more than thirty million people a year are following the signs—At Least Our Rainforest Isn’t Disappearing. But in order to build Venice and Paris, more of the Colorado needs to be brought to Vegas. Or the Virgin River needs to be dammed, drying up part of Zion National Park. Or the basins of northern Nevada, watering holes for elk, cattle, and people, need to be siphoned to Clark County. Otherwise, Las Vegas is approaching something that nobody in this town ever wants to face: an adult saying no.
BACK AT the Mirage, the dolphins are still under lock. Tank trouble, I’m told. The rainforest hasn’t disappeared. Saw a guy in hip-waders trying to prune a philodendron. The Fever has started to take hold. Not gambling. I’m trying to keep that at a low simmer, dropping no more than fifty bucks a pop during the long, forced stroll through the casino to the elevator. The heat is over the impending collapse of the Sands. In a few days, it will be gone, imploded, 1950s gin-and-tonic America at It’s leisure height, reduced to dust. There’s a buzz on the streets and inside the gambling pits. When they pulverize that great block of Vegas antiquity—a hotel not quite fifty years old—it will be the largest non-nuclear explosion in Nevada history, I’m told.
PATRICIA MULROY may be the most powerful person in Las Vegas, a public servant at that. The mayor, Jan Laverty Jones, a former TV pitchwoman for a car dealership, has no power; but she looks really good on television. Mulroy, on the other hand, is head of the Southern Nevada Water Authority. She can move rivers, keep cities alive, make other states tremble, destroy farms, eliminate entire species. The power is almost biblical, that sense of controlling creation. Los Angeles had William Mulholland, the Irish immigrant in top hat, watch fob, and three-piece suit, for the job of creating a modern city out of a semidesert. Vegas has a woman in purple lipstick, who talks tough, can charm when she wants to, but remains as focused as a raven on roadkill.
By deliberate contrivance, Las Vegas today is doing exactly what Los Angeles did a century ago, when it grew from 50,000 people in 1890 to 200,000 in 1904. It’s orange blossom allure, neo-Spanish romanticism, and freewheeling moral climate, stoked by railroad migration pamphleteers, were in peril by the turn of the century. Los Angeles, the city that might have taken shape within the natural constraints of the basin, would have topped out at perhaps 100,000 people, Mulholland warned. At his urging, voters in the Southland passed the largest bond issue in the history of the United States at the time—$23 million—to create an aqueduct from the Owens Valley, through the Mojave desert, uphill through the Tehachapi Mountains, and then downhill to the San Fernando Valley and soon-to-bespreading mass of L.A. “The Owens River is ours,” the Los Angeles Times editorialized, not long after a group of investors had conned a small group of alfalfa farmers and fruit orchardists into selling their water rights for a song. “Our business now is to hustle and bring it here and make Los Angeles the garden spot of the earth and home of millions of contented people.”
Contented no more, Angelenos have been pouring into Las Vegas, into Mariners Cove and Harbour Vista and The Lakes (with It’s ten miles of artificial shoreline), to try to make another Garden Spot amidst the cracked earth. Mulholland’s engineering miracle was so bravura—fifty-three tunnels bored into the mountains, five hundred miles of roads, a construction crew of six thousand men—that the aqueduct that drained the Owens Valley to make Eden in Los Angeles should have lasted more than a century. But water brought subdivisions in place of orange groves, and that brought rivers of backed-up cars over plains of asphalt, which brought wretched a
ir that killed people who came to Southern California for their health. So, they are repeating the entire cycle all over again, only the arc from birth to boom to urban suffocation is much quicker this time. By the end of the twentieth century, Los Angeles was not only the metaphor for a Western city gone bad, but It’s residents were forced to lose the bluegrass lawns, and accept a civic routine of dodging the low-flow shower police. It is Pat Mulroy’s job to make sure that Vegas will at least have no limits on lawn-watering as it slips into decline.
I find her in a backlot of her agency, where water is bursting out of open hydrants, a virtual hydro-show on the pavement of the parking lot in the midday heat. Muscled, shirtless utility men are wrestling with hoses. The water czar has been supervising water games with the crews; they say it’s a drill to learn how to turn a gusher off fast. In the time I watch her, a good-size Vegas lake trickles off the pavement and into the sand.
“It’s nothing,” says Mulroy. “More water evaporates on the way to Phoenix in their canal than we need to keep growing.”
“Growing” is the key word. Seven states share the Colorado, but only one is on steroids. And only one has reached the legal limit of how much water it can take from the river. And only one has virtually no restrictions on future use. And only one gives you the Nile and the Hudson (and soon, Venice) in a state with but a single year-round river, the Humboldt, up north, that originates inside It’s borders. Even Arizona, where the developers have long run wild, uses water at only half the rate of most people in Nevada, which is to say, the Las Vegas metro area.
“These casinos with their water attractions, they use recycled shower water,” she says. “They’re good conservers of water. It’s lawn-watering that’s our problem. People like green grass in the desert.”
In the other Colorado River states, Mulroy is sometimes referred to as “The Water Witch of the West.” They don’t call her that in Vegas, of course. I would not be surprised if some casino put her image on an ornamental gate. Essentially, she is holding a great swath of the Southwest hostage until Las Vegas gets what it wants. One bit of leverage is the Virgin River, architect of some of the most stunning canyon country in the West, bringing bits of green and pools of clear water as it snakes through Zion National Park in Utah. But as it makes It’s way to the Colorado, the Virgin takes a little bend into the state of Nevada. As soon as the river slips into Nevada, it is at risk. Mulroy reasons that the water authority should be able to dam the Virgin— their river—and take from it what it will. But without the hurried flow of the Virgin, Zion National Park would be left to feed on broth. It’s color and character and muscularity would change. There would be no sandy beaches from spring floods, no polished sandstone in the lower valleys, no aspens. Mulroy knows that this option horrifies many people—choking off one of the world’s premier national parks to keep faux lakes going up in gated subdivisions of Vegas. And she would face ecoterrorists rising from their yeast farms if she ever tried such a thing. But It’s a good card that she holds tight, keeping everyone guessing.
Another option lies to the north, in the basins where real pine trees grow in real Nevada national forests. One range of mountains after the other— the Snakes, the Egans, the Pancakes, the Hot Creeks, the Monitors, the Toquimas, the Toiyabes, the Shoshones, the Desatoyas, the Clan Alpines, the Stillwaters—marches from Utah to the California border. These are big peaks, scraping the sky at better than ten thousand feet in most places. They gather a good knitting of snow, which trickles down into the valleys, then melts into the aquifers. Some of it comes back up as springs—seeps of clear water—which is why there are so many elk, bighorn sheep, deer, and mountain lions prancing around central Nevada, even though there is not a single decent river. Las Vegas has filed plans to do to the basin and range country of the central part of the state what it did to the old Paiute watering holes. They want to drain the groundwater that brings life to a huge part of the state and, through a series of pipes and aquifers, channel it all down to a place that epitomizes what most of the world would be doing on Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war, to paraphrase Hunter Thompson.
Up north, in the dying little towns in the Great Basin, they have no idea how to fight Las Vegas. Nye County, the biggest in the area, is a hothouse of cranks waging a tired sagebrush rebellion by fax and talk radio. Dick Carver, a county commissioner, is their leader. He took a bulldozer out, with a pistol strapped to his leg and a copy of the Constitution stuffed in his shirt pocket, and told the Forest Service to let him plow open a road into a wilderness, or else face the consequences. That act landed him on the cover of Time (“The Angry West!”). He got a bad sunburn posing for the picture, seven hours of staring into the sun. It made him look even angrier. He lives in the Big Smoky Valley, a basin that would become the Big Worthless Cracked Desert Floor if Las Vegas gets hold of It’s groundwater. The largest town in Nye County is Tonopah, which was the boomtown at the start of the twentieth century, gold dust on the streets. Now it is sandpaper-beige and listing to one side. Tonopah looks about a half step short of the grave, huddled against the wind, buildings shuttered and haunting. It resembles the little town that Clint Eastwood toyed with in High Plains Drifter, finally torching the place after proving the moral hypocrisy of It’s citizens. What chance does Tonopah, preoccupied with It’s media war with Washington, have against Pat Mulroy?
As Edward Abbey said, there is no lack of water in the Mojave Desert unless you try to establish a city where no city should be. Tonopah, in It’s final days, is what Las Vegas might look like if it hadn’t tapped into the great vein of the Colorado. There is no overwhelming need for whatever minerals can still be forced from deep under Tonopah’s ripped-up hide. But everybody wants what Vegas has—lights, fantasy, the Fever, and all you can eat for $8.95.
Las Vegas will not put the bullet in Tonopah’s head or dam the Virgin River, if it gets the third option. That is to redo the Colorado River Compact—the Law of the River, a pact that governs how every drop of the river will be used. To be fair, Nevada got shortchanged in the 1920s, when the law was drawn up, because nobody then lived there. Now, Nevada is home to America’s fastest-growing city, doing for vice what Detroit did for automobiles; and it is desperately thirsty. All it wants is another fifty years of water.
The plan: Take some of that Colorado River How from California (which has got too much as it is!). And borrow a little from Arizona (they’re not using it all). And then, the canals of Venice can be filled on land where the Sands used to stand. And there will be bluegrass which needs about forty inches of rain annually—for all. Without a change in how the Colorado is divvied up, Vegas will brown, wilt, and blow away, Mulroy says. A big Tonopah. But, couldn’t Las Vegas learn to love the desert, as Tucson has done, using a third as much water as Vegas does, losing the lawns in favor of cactus and paloverde? Or couldn’t it say no to a housing subdivision or two?
“If you tried to slow growth around here, you’d have chaos,” says Mulroy. “You can’t expect that this community, all these new people and all these babies and all these families, are going to just go away.”
So if Vegas is in fact the living embodiment of Abbeys memorable crack—“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell”— then the choice is clear. Chaos or cancer.
“A resort community like ours, we don’t have any choice but to keep growing,” says Richard Bunker. He is head of the Nevada Resort Association, and, donning his civic hat, is vice chairman of the Colorado River Commission of Nevada. Bunker is a rare person in the Mojave Desert: a native. As a kid, he went on camping trips to the very spot where the Sahara now stands on the Strip. At sixty-three, he has seen Vegas morph from a sand-lashed train depot to the Arnold Schwarzenegger of cities. He works out of a new office off Howard Hughes Parkway. Inside, a perpetual mist keeps a little bit of the rain forest growing on the ground floor.
He refers to Vegas as “a product,” never as a city. “You have to continuously reinvent the produc
t, or people will stop coming here,” he says. “But right now, we’re quite healthy. There’s no corporate income tax, no inventory tax, no state income tax—people love to come here.”
He mentions the brown cloud, a recent arrival. On this day, it looks purple. “You just gotta stay indoors on some days,” he says. “But look, water is the key to everything. If we don’t have water, we suffocate. So we go to the courts and present our dilemma as water for people versus water just being wasted downstream.”
While the other states balk and watch in horror, Vegas is leaving nothing to chance. About twenty-five miles from the city, a mechanical mole is at work, digging a fifteen-foot-wide tunnel from Lake Mead to the city, a $2-billion dare. Mulroy says this underground Suez is just an upgrade, for the time being. But that is like building a domed stadium to fix a leaky cabin roof. Nobody in any of the neighbor states is fooled. If Vegas builds it, water will follow, one way or the other.
“TEN! Nine! Eight! Seven! Six!…”
Got a few slugs of tequila inside of me and a full Vegas buffet festering. The Mirage is quite culturally sensitive, in addition to being a home for orphaned dolphins, white tigers, and rainforest plants that wouldn’t survive without recycled shower water. It’s breakfast buffet has a Jewish section, whole mountains of gefilte fish and lox next to the usual heart-stopping fare. I passed, waiting for the dinner, a Sands-implosion special buffet—and then I ate too much prime rib. Outside, the streets are jammed, though people are kept a proper lawsuit-avoidance distance from the big event. We are witnessing the execution of a great institution in the predawn darkness; it is enough, for now, to shake many of us out of the catatonia that comes from being in a city with 115,000 slot machines. The Rat Pack nested there at the Sands, Dino, Frank, Sammy, and broads who could hold their liquor and knew how to dance in stiletto heels. “Tell me quick. Ain’t love a kick in the head,” Dean Martin sang. Showbiz royalty packed the place. It was Monte Carlo without forced theme. It’s day is gone. In another ten years, perhaps, there will be a faux Sands Hotel, built on a 1950s Rat Pack theme, rising somewhere on the edge of the Mojave.