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I’m not quite a Vegas O.G., but with each passing year, I get a little bit closer.

At “only” 40 years old, I can only have so much history with the place without breaking the space-time continuum, but I’ve already been here long enough to witness some visible changes to the town.

I was documenting things with video long before YouTube even existed.  I had 500gigs of video when 30gig hard drives were about the largest you could buy.  Several months ago I mentioned that I had found a box of un-transferred tapes, and I am finally taking a little bit of time to actually go through them.  As they are coming over the firewire cable, I make it a special point to look closely at the Vegas footage.

If Las Vegas were an animal, it would be a dog.  Not for the obvious reasons, such as a constantly visible anus, but because we age 7 years for every normal city year.  This town changes so fast, that as soon as you think you’ve done everything there is to do, your knowledge is already obsolete.

Vegas “expertise” no longer exists (assuming it ever did).  This is true even if you live on The Strip.  There are just too many things changing from one month to the next, and you only truly know a place if you have been there in the last week.  Trying to keep up-to-date knowledge about this town is like pushing a wet noodle uphill.

If you visit only once a year, you literally have to consider each visit a trip to a different city, because what was here last year, may not be here this year.  Even if it is, the quality and characteristics have probably changed.

While looking through some of the old tapes, I couldn’t help but be surprised at how much has changed in a few short years … but just as surprising as what has changed, is what hasn’t changed.  At least not visibly.

While everything north of Spring Mountain looks completely foreign, the corner of Tropicana and Las Vegas Boulevard is nearly indistinguishable from a decade ago.  The MGM, Trop, New York New York, and Excalibur all look the same … and photos from the MGM-Trop pedestrian bridge taken in 1999 could just as easily have been taken last night.

I found one particular tape I made when I was staying at the Tropicana.  Not much has changed with the Trop except for the the closing of Folies, and I like the property almost as much today as I liked it then.  The more I think about it, one of the reasons I like places like the Tropicana, Sahara, Luxor, and Stratosphere is because they still remind me of my personal heydays with the city.

I was not around during the martini-swilling hipster days of Frank, Sammy, or even Elvis.  That is a Vegas which I never personally knew.  While I have seen old footage of the swinging crooners, the only Vegas I have ever known is the post-Mirage megaresort town.  This is the incarnation of the town that I grew to like enough to move here.

I watched a recorded trolley ride from the Tropicana to the Sahara, and it was almost sad to watch.  I passed the Boardwalk Hotel and the Stardust.  Back then, douchebags were actually few and far between.  There were mostly middle class people everywhere being themselves, and the entire vibe was a little more cheerful.

This was Vegas just as mega-clubs like LAX and PURE were starting to hit the scene.  It was just before “What Happens In Vegas” doucheified and damn near ruined the city.  It was before Paris Hilton, it was before everyone had a “Vegas Blog”, it was before the mid-2000’s CSI overexposure that engulfed the town.  It was Las Vegas before Las Vegas started believing its own hype.

Given the number of Burbank movies being made in Las Vegas these days, it is obvious that we are doing our best to bring that hype back, but I don’t think it’s going to work this time.  The formulaic “oh, look at all of the funny things our central characters did because they were sooooooo drunk” angle is kind of played out.

Yeah, yeah, they drank themselves silly, ended up in a limousine, somehow visited a wedding chapel, saw Elvis … oh shoot me in the frigging head already.

Leaving Las Vegas was probably the only decent movie ever made about this town, and even that was grossly unrealistic and wildly optimistic.

If you come to Vegas in a state of depression, you aren’t going to find any compassion.  The first hooker you encounter will take every penny you have the moment you fall asleep.  She’s not going to take care of you for months, and you aren’t going to die nailing her.  Oh, and she isn’t going to look like Elizabeth Shue.  This, I promise.

Instead of the renewed marketing and promotional push with the aid of Movie conglomerates, I’d like to see Vegas get its 2000-2005 groove back the old-fashioned way.  Good service, good value, good odds … hell, just good everything.  It’s a widely held belief that the more you have to advertise, the less you have to offer.

I miss the Boardwalk.  I miss the Stardust.  I miss the MGM amusement park.  I miss scantily-clad 8+ cocktail waitresses.  I miss English-speaking cab drivers.  I miss not having to scrutinize the odds at a Blackjack table before sitting down.  I miss the Las Vegas Trolley (I don’t know if you have noticed, but this has also been scrapped).

Of course we have some great new things now that we didn’t have then, such as the Wynn complex and Palazzo, but I do think the city peaked somewhere around 2005.

“They” claim that everything is cyclical, and that we are merely in a trough before the next run up.  This may very well be true.

Until that happens, though, I will continue to watch my home movies and reminisce about the “good old days”.

Once a month or so, I will even commit a small amount of it to online video so that perhaps you can take a walk down memory lane as well.

I’m still looking forward to tomorrow’s Las Vegas (City Center, etc), but I do hope that the next incarnation of the city incorporates some of the elements from the previous incarnation.

I think that we would all be better off for it.

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