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Posted March 21, 2001
Begetting a BoomtownBy Alan Greenblatt Nothing will make you feel like you’re living in a new century like making quick consecutive visits to Buffalo and Las Vegas. Buffalo, a great economic powerhouse at the turn of the 20th century, is now the ultimate urban fixer-upper, full of charm but fearfully low on jobs. In 1900, Vegas hadn’t even been founded, and only 30 people were then resident in the valley. Yet it remains, 50 years after its birth as a major gaming center, one of the great growth stories in America and perhaps the ultimate symbol of the nation’s excessive tendencies. Buffalo has lost half its population since 1960. The city’s decline began with the completion of the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1959, which allowed Atlantic-bound commerce to bypass Buffalo’s great inland port. The subsequent loss of a Bethlehem Steel plant and its 25,000 jobs was the killer blow, among many, in the death of its old manufacturing economy. Buffalo’s political and business leaders never made the transition to the New Economy, believing incorrectly that heavy industry would rebound.
Vegas was more nimble. Its economy was based on service from the first, of course. With casino-style gambling proliferating all over the country over the past decade, Vegas re-imagined itself as a theme park. Vegas now represents total convenience. Every well-known chain store is represented in one of the malls off the casinos in the massive 4,000-room hotels. Every manner of fast food is available, while every famous haute cuisine chef in America, it seems, has an outpost in the desert. (Wolfgang Puck alone has four restaurants in three hotels.)
What’s more, you can visit re-creations of other famous travel destinations simply by fighting the traffic down Las Vegas Boulevard. Hotels boasting tropical themes, mini versions of Venetian canals, a half-size Eiffel Tower, a truncated mockup of the skyline of New York (complete with roller coaster), and the largest pyramid outside of Egypt all have appeared within the last several years.
The irony is that Buffalo made Las Vegas possible. It was Buffalo engineers who first harnessed hydropower and turned it into alternating current, anticipating Hoover Dam and making possible the grandiose lights of the Vegas Strip. It was a Buffalo industrialist named Willis Haviland Carrier who formulated the basic theories of air-conditioning, minimizing the discomforts of the Nevada summer.
And it was Buffalo, to a large extent, that fostered this great American notion that you can in fact have goods from all parts of the country and the world brought within your easy reach. The massive elevators that now mostly sit slumbering along Lake Erie once turned Midwestern grain into Cheerios that rode on boats away from Buffalo to the whole of the East.
It is impossible to imagine what kind of boomtown Las Vegas might foster a hundred years from now.
Alan Greenblatt is a staff writer for Governing.
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