Gambling Coast-to-Coast

In the Las Vegas economy, changing patterns of travel and new ecological constraints that created weaknesses could not be masked by rising total revenues.

During the slumps of the mid-1970s and early 1980s, support industries suffered more than the tourist trade, accounting in large part for unemployment rates that climbed above 10 percent.

The resort's reputation as a boom town suffered accordingly. Tourist volume grew steadily from 1974 through 1980, but then fell off slightly in 1981 and 1982.

The addition of new hotel and motel rooms demonstrated businessmen's faith in continued growth, but occupancy rates peaked during the late 1970s and then started to decline sharply, too.

The town appeared to have over expanded once more, and the financial troubles faced by several hotels and casinos suggested that Las Vegans needed to come to terms with the reality of slower growth.

Attempts to broaden the appeal of the resort by diversifying its attractions--- adding sporting and musical events as well as stressing family-oriented themes--- and by promoting and packaging gambling more aggressively indicated that the community was responding to the new conditions.

In reevaluating old formulas for prosperity, Las Vegas could gain perspective by reexamining its history.

Moreover, the regional setting of Las Vegas suggested that it would maintain resourceful enough to overcome the obstacles placed in its path by economic change and ecological challenge.

Western societies in American history continually demonstrated an ability to prosper while embracing the risks presented by growth.

Continued expansion seemed more precarious in southern Nevada after the mid-1960s, but the record showed that the metropolis had adjusted to previous crises.

With fewer tourists arriving from the East, Las Vegas found itself thrown back increasingly upon the very far West that had proven so fruitful and innovative in previous decades.

As tourists' lengthening visits suggested, Westerners still derived satisfaction from vacations in Las Vegas, where they could reenact the gamble of their lives.

Moreover, the doubts engendered by political, economic, and ecological crises after the mid-1960s must have made the range of possibilities available in Las Vegas even more attractive, as choices in other dimensions of life declined.

On balance, location still appeared to favor the desert gambling capital.

The meteoric rise of Atlantic City as a rival of Las Vegas raised doubts about the future of gaming in southern Nevada, but in light of its past, Las Vegas seemed to have the odds on its side as it looked to the future.

The rapid growth of Atlantic City after 1978 seemed to suggest that it, too could regard success as a sure thing, but in fact the New Jersey resort was moving with an uncertain new current in the American culture of gambling.

It appealed explicitly to easterners, rather than Westerners, and instead of shaping a new frontier, gambling was reshaping an old, rather run-down city.

Moreover, Atlantic City typified Americans' new perception that gambling had some redeeming social value, not because it might prove therapeutic for society, but rather because it might provide a more painless form of taxation.