Las Vegas audiotours

Nevada legalized casino gambling in 1931, the same year the state reduced the waiting period for divorce to six weeks -- two legal experiments designed to attract money and traffic to the Mojave Desert. Las Vegas had been incorporated as a city just 20 years earlier, in 1911, by the railroad. The Strip, that improbable corridor of casino hotels that defines the city's global image, is technically not in Las Vegas at all -- it runs through the unincorporated townships of Paradise and Winchester, a jurisdictional quirk that matters to tax lawyers and essentially nobody else.

The city tests the relationship between scale and sincerity.

The Bellagio fountains, synchronized to music, perform every 15 minutes for free in front of a property where standard rooms run to four figures. The Neon Museum in old downtown stores the salvaged signs of demolished casino hotels in an outdoor boneyard -- the Stardust, the Moulin Rouge (the first racially integrated casino hotel in the city, opened in 1955), the Sands -- a graveyard of neon that becomes unexpectedly moving after dark. The Fremont Street Experience, a LED canopy 460 meters long in the historic downtown, runs shows every night where the actual sky is replaced with high-resolution advertising.