The secret side of Las Vegas

BEYOND the bright lights of Sin City, let loose in a bulldozer, eat steak like a mobster and play vintage pinball, writes Chris Ayres.

las vegas escape nov 11

BEYOND the bright lights of Sin City, let loose in a bulldozer, eat steak like a mobster and play vintage pinball, writes Chris Ayres.

Activities

- Bulldozer therapy

The first thing to know about Las Vegas is this: whoever came up with the name Sin City really wasn't kidding. "Arrive with luggage, leave with baggage," as the old joke goes.

But hangovers and ill-advised wagers aren't the only reason to come to this parched corner of southern Nevada, a four-hour drive from LA.

There's also the unmistakable sense that you've arrived in a place where the laws of reality are simply not being enforced.

This, after all, is a town where an exotic dancer was once put on trial for murdering her boyfriend over buried treasure  -  5.4 tonnes of silver bullion, to be precise; it's a town where tourists used to attend rooftop "atomic bomb parties" to view 10-kiloton blasts, wearing only shorts and sunglasses for protection (the Nevada Test Site is 113km away); and it's a town that counts among its prime attractions a fake volcano that erupts on the hour.

All of which explains why I decide to purge myself of self-destructive tendencies upon arrival  - to get the sin out of my system, so to speak. And for this, there is nothing better than the "Dig & Destroy" package at Dig This, a scene of diabolical hedonism on a patch of scrubland next to Interstate 15.

Here, a squat Kiwi named Ed Mumm keeps a fleet of construction-grade excavators and bulldozers and, in defiance of all common sense, allows pretty much anyone (for a fee, naturally) to play with them after only a few minutes of training.

This is the "dig" part of the experience. The "destroy" part comes later, at a nearby gun range, where automatic weapons are supplied with similar bravado.

"Don't worry: it's impossible to make a mess out here!" Mumm reassures me, once I've been breathalysed (an insurance requirement), fitted with a fluorescent vest and handed a Diet Coke (this being America, the cabs of the bulldozers have airconditioning and cup holders).

Before long, I'm tearing up the ground, scooping it up, making hills, driving over them, then covering them back up again. Judging by my fellow diggers, it's not just men who find this enjoyable.

"At least half our clients are women," Mumm says. "And they tend to be better operators, because they listen to the instructions and they don't put as much pressure on themselves when they're digging. They also laugh and scream a lot, which I like."

He's right: there are whoops and giggles as the bright yellow machines are driven as if they were life-sized Tonka toys.

Meanwhile, beyond the freeway, under a sky hotter than all the ovens of hell, the insane skyline of Las Vegas Boulevard  - where the Eiffel Tower stands between Brooklyn Bridge and a lurching pirate galleon  - glitters approvingly.

Later, Mumm tells me his company also offers a gentler package, known as Excavate and Exfoliate, in which the gun range is substituted for a spa treatment. Strangely enough, it's not very popular.

See digthisvegas.com 

Shopping

- Your very own poker face

Shopping is another, albeit potentially ruinous, way to stay out of trouble in Las Vegas.

And by ruinous, I mean The Wynn hotel has a Ferrari dealership in the lobby. There are more interesting places to spend your money, however, such as the Gambler's General Store. Getting there requires a car or a taxi  - the nondescript warehouse is a 10-minute drive north of The Strip, close to the downtown area.

I visit on a weekday morning, and get quickly immersed in the rows of dice, poker chips, antique slot machines and used casino playing cards (US99 a deck).

"In the old days, dice manufacturers could sell only to casinos," manager Wendy Rock says. "So in the 1980s, they set up a retail subsidiary. This is it." Business isn't as good as it was during the poker craze of the early 2000s, she admits.

But judging by the number of pokie machines on display  - "NOT A CASINO", reads a sign, "THESE MACHINES ARE FOR SALE"  -  there is still plenty of demand. Also on offer are roulette wheels, card shufflers, gambling apparel (such as dark glasses to obscure your tells during poker games) and a vast library of books, mostly on strategy and odds.

In the souvenir department, meanwhile, there's a personalised poker chip service, which allows you to put your face and/or business details on Sin City's most popular unit of currency. They cost US79 each, with a minimum 100-chip order.

Not all gambling equipment can be bought: in many states, pokies can be sold only if they're more than 25 years old. Roulette wheels, meanwhile, must be less than 81cm in size. And what's legal in America might not be the case overseas, so the shop recommends checking with Customs before taking anything home. Given some of the prices, this is wise. A pokie from the 1940s  - the days when Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel ruled the town -  goes for $2995.

- See gamblersgeneralstore.com 

Dining

- Steak and cupcakes

Ask former mayor Oscar Goodman for the official dish of Las Vegas, and he doesn't even take a breath: "Steak!" The bloodier the better.

When the mob still ran the city, it's all they wanted. Clearly, the members of Sin City's brutally violent gambling syndicates didn't spend a great deal of time worrying about cholesterol. Indeed, in the carpark of one of the city's better-known red meat establishments  -  Tony Roma's on Sahara Ave  - you can still make out the scorch marks from the car bomb that almost killed Frank "Lefty" Rosenthal in 1982.

Lefty was the former casino boss who gained infamy during a congressional mob investigation for exercising the Fifth Amendment right to remain silent 37 times, even when asked if he was left-handed. Robert De Niro's character in Casino is loosely based on him.

Since retiring as mayor, Goodman has opened his own place  - Oscar's Beef, Booze and Broads in the Plaza Hotel, overlooking the enclosed and redeveloped Fremont St. At night, live bands play on the street while half-naked girls dance above the blackjack tables in the casinos.

The beef and booze at Oscar's are self-explanatory. As for the broads, well, Goodman is known for "never going anywhere without my showgirls".

Cocktail-wise, try asking for What Oscar's Having, a gin cocktail, no vermouth, with the olive replaced by a jalapeno. Avoid the Mitt Romney  - unless you want a grinning barman to bring you a glass of water.

If you spend long enough at Oscar's, you'll almost certainly meet "Hizzoner" himself, who spends an hour every day in his memorabilia-stacked office behind the bar, composing his memoirs. And if he's not there, you'll at least see his likeness plastered all over the walls.

"Look, no one else in this town could call their restaurant Oscar's Beef, Booze and Broads without getting hit over the head by the political correctness department," he tells me. "But it's me! People just say, 'Oh, that's Oscar being Oscar' ... "

A note on dessert: wait until the next morning, then take a 25-minute drive to Retro Bakery. There, owner Kari Haskell  - a rock 'n' roll mum with short blonde hair and tattoos  - bakes cupcakes with topping so smooth, it tastes almost like ice cream. Try the Hop Scotch: it's vanilla cake with vanilla buttercream, dipped in butterscotch ganache.

Also highly recommended: the Pink Lemonade and the Maple Bacon.

And if you don't drive? "We deliver to The Strip all the time," Haskell says. "Even just one cupcake, it's not a problem. As long you pay the $20 delivery charge."

- See plazahotelcasino.com/dining (Oscar's) and retrobakerylv.com 

Architecture

- The meaning of squished titanium

Downtown Las Vegas is worth visiting for other reasons than the Gambler's General Store. Where Las Vegas Boulevard meets Park Paseo, for example, there's the John S Park historic district, named after one of the city's pioneers, and a well-preserved time warp of 1950s American suburbia.

While it isn't exactly a tourist attraction, devotees of kitsch mid-century architecture, as featured in TV series Mad Men or the 2009 Tom Ford film A Single Man, consider this one of the best-preserved developments of the era.

Nearly every home looks as though it might once have been the subject of a David Hockney painting. And it's a wonder they're still there: the entire area was very nearly flattened in 1996 by the late casino mogul Bob Stupak to make way for an 85m tall oversized replica of the RMS Titanic.

He didn't get his way, thankfully, and instead built the Stratosphere hotel and casino nearby. The latter's 350m observation tower now looms overhead like a visiting alien mothership.

A few blocks northwest, meanwhile, is Las Vegas's architectural claim to the future, or at least its bid to be taken seriously as a real city, not just an empty pleasuretropolis: the melting steel ribbons of the Frank Gehry-designed Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health, positioned opposite the Smith Center for the Performing Arts, with its Art Deco facade and 17-storey bell tower. If Frank Lloyd Wright had ever designed a cathedral, this is how it might have looked.

Goodman was instrumental in making all this happen and, on the whole, the people of Las Vegas love him for it. Goodman is the one-time mob lawyer who brags openly about getting his (now deceased) client Anthony "The Ant" Spilotro out of the "whole head-in-a-vice thing"  -  as depicted in Martin Scorsese's 1995 film Casino, loosely based on Spilotro's life.

When I go to see Goodman at his office near the Las Vegas Convention Centre, he refuses to take the architecture thing all too seriously.

"Everyone tries to guess the significance of the squished titanium," he tells me of the Lou Ruvo Centre. "They say 'Oh, y'know, it's a metaphor for the human brain', all that stuff. Well  - not so."

Goodman proceeds to give the real story. "What happened is that Frank Gehry had an aversion to Las Vegas, and it took us a very long time to convince him to do a project out here. When he finally agreed, we went out to see him at his office, and I remember he had some crepe paper on his desk. He screwed it up, then he threw it down on the floor."

Goodman shrugs as if in apology. "That was it," he says. "The design never really changed."

-- See thesmithcenter.com 

Culture

- What to do when there isn't any

Las Vegas doesn't do museums like other cities do museums.

Instead of trying to hold its own with New York in the high culture department, it sticks to what it knows: crime, explosions and coin-operated entertainment.

Hence I spend a day shuttling between the Atomic Testing Museum, the Mob Museum and the Pinball Hall of Fame. At the Atomic Testing Museum, I see a real nuclear warhead, view (and feel the backblast of) a simulated test explosion, and read stories about the 5am detonations that used to send fireballs above The Strip.

It might seem like an odd thing to glamorise, of course  - indeed, the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce was recently criticised for recreating an infamous 1957 photograph of "Miss Atomic Bomb" wearing a mushroom-cloud swimsuit. But the curation here is unflinching and intelligent, and it's a fact that, without the Manhattan Project scientists who arrived in Nevada to continue their work after World War II, Las Vegas would not have grown in the way it did.

The Mob Museum takes a similarly difficult subject matter, but treats it very differently: it's pure entertainment, as you'd expect from one of former mayor Goodman's creations.

Inside the old federal courthouse building, restored for the purpose at spectacular and controversial expense, the museum features the original St Valentine's Day Massacre wall (complete with bullet holes and bloodstains), gruesome crime scene photographs and interactive exhibits.

Most impressive is the original courtroom from the 1950 anti-mob Kefauver Hearings (the judge's bench was built with a steel plate inside, so he could duck behind it if gunfire broke out) and the spectacular multi-screen video presentation that accompanies it.

And then to the Pinball Hall of Fame, in an unmarked industrial building not far from The Strip, crammed with vintage machines, all of them meticulously restored and ready to play.

The owner of the place, Tim Arnold, is tinkering with an exhibit nearby, nearly half his body inside the cabinet. He used to install pinball machines in casinos for a living but could never bring himself to scrap them when they were replaced.

"There isn't a lot you can do in Las Vegas for less than 10 bucks," Arnold says. "Here, you can play all night."

- See atomictestingmuseum.org, themobmuseum.org and pinballmuseum.org 

Nightlife

- It happens during the day

After a night of pinball, what could be better than a morning of clubbing? Yes, this is the latest trend in Las Vegas, made famous by an MTV reality show and, more sensationally, the UK's Prince Harry. Dayclubs are essentially hotel swimming pools with DJs, bouncers on the door and a recliner-side food and beverage service.

Crucially, you don't usually have to be a hotel guest to get in. Cover charges can also be avoided with promotional fliers -  but you must agree to spend a certain amount once inside. At Liquid Pool Lounge inside the Aria resort and casino complex, it's $100 a chair, rising to $10,000 for a cabana fitting up to a dozen people during, say, a busy American holiday weekend.

"People like coming here because there are no kids around, and no old people swimming laps," says Pearce Cleveland, a DJ and all-round "mood director" at The Light Group, which operates several day club venues.

We meet for a drink at Liquid, one of the more intimate pool parties in Las Vegas, with a capacity of about 850. Others, such as Encore Beach Club at the Wynn (infamously attended by Prince Harry) can host up to 3000.

Dayclubs have become a lot more luxurious since Rehab at the Hard Rock Hotel pioneered the craze. "Sometimes you just don't want to be sprayed with a water gun, or have someone throw up over you," says Cleveland, referring to the city's harder-partying establishments.

"Actually, here at Liquid, we get a lot of locals who just want to relax and work on their tans." He pauses. "And by locals, I mean strippers."

- See lightgroup.com/las-vegas/daylife/liquid-pool-lounge  

Las Vegas

---  3 Ways to do it ---

- Budget 

- Stay

Right in the action on the South Strip, New York New York has tastefully decorated rooms with flatscreen TVs and marble bathrooms, plus restaurants (from $59; nynyhotelcasino.com).

- Eat

The world's largest chocolate fountain cascades inside champion pastry-maker Jean Philippe Patisserie at the Bellagio hotel. It's known for fantastic sorbets, gelati and sweet confections (four macaroons $12; bellagio.com).

- Do

The best free entertainment is to wander from Paris to Polynesia along the 6.5km Strip, where casino hotels host an ever-grander series of spectacles, from light shows to replicas of famous landmarks.

 Luxury

- Stay

Skylofts at MGM Grand scales new heights of luxury, with everything from spa tubs - with spa butlers  - to a personal concierge on offer in its cavernous apartments (from $700; skyloftsmgmgrand.com).

- Eat

Guy Savoy at Caesar's Palace is the intimate US restaurant of the three-Michelin-starred French chef; expect superlatives in every dish on the menu (from $75; bit.ly/cO5ygk).

- Do

Catch a show at the newly opened Smith Center for the Performing Arts, which hosts Broadway musicals, concerts, jazz, dance and comedy evenings among many other events (Broadway show tickets from $40; thesmithcenter.com).

Mid-range 

- Stay

Mandalay Bay has elegant rooms, great restaurants, and its own beach and pool complex (Sky View Suite from $280; mandalaybay.com).

- Eat

Steeped in Old Vegas charm, the venerable Top of Binion's Steakhouse serves up prime midwestern cuts in an oak-walled dining room with superb views over the city and impeccable service (steaks from $33; www.binions.com).

- Do

The Neon Museum holds the largest collection of neon signage in the world, some dating way back to the 1930s. Head to the Neon Boneyard for a colourful walking tour ($18; tours by appointment; neonmuseum.org).

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Go2

- LAS VEGAS 

- Getting there

Qantas and Virgin fly to Los Angeles with connections to Las Vegas.

- Getting around

The Strip is easiest explored by foot; for longer journeys, take a taxi from a casino rank. A monorail connects many of the city's attractions (www.lvmonorail.com). Car hire is available for trips out of the city ( hertz.com).

- Further reading

Try Lonely Planet's Las Vegas Encounter.

See visitlasvegas.com