The academy’s view of Las Vegas has long been that of Jean Baudrillard in his America. We are inclined to think of it as a desert-bound expression of the ‘pure baroque of Disneyland’, played out to the level of a (barely) real city, and as such inseparable from a sense of hyper-real superficiality that masks fragility and dissoluteness with neon and cash. Fictive representations have varied in their treatment, but the ability to see Vegas as the natural home of mob operations (Casino, 1995), the FBI’s biggest crime lab outside of its headquarters (CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, 2000) or even a solitary vampire preying on cocktail waitresses (The Night Stalker, 1972) lend it a decidedly Dionysian edge which is at first not easily reconcilable with the picket fences of American suburbia.

By contrast Schwartz suggests that the suburbanization of the United States provides an interpretive framework through which to understand the development of Las Vegas resorts, as well as those in Atlantic City and on Indian land throughout the nation. We might, therefore, construct a line of development that begins not in Nevada at all, but with the 1920s rise of the private ownership of automobiles among the middle classes and the change to the structure of American cities that this precipitated, a change which the need to build homes for returning soldiers following WWII ensured would characterize the way America has grown and developed in the past sixty years, and the way its citizens understand their environments and are socialized.

The casino resorts of Vegas developed, he tells us in his introduction and first chapter, along the highway southwest to Los Angeles, the road which was to become the ‘Strip’ of today, in a mimicry of suburban development of the time which created a virtual subdivision for Southern Californians to visit which was as convenient to drive to as their local strip-mall or drive-in theatre. The ‘suburban’ nature of the casino resorts along Las Vegas Boulevard is, for Schwartz, compounded by their nature as individual destinations, which strive to provide their guests with everything they need for their vacations in order to ensure that the majority of their guests’ disposable dollars are spent with them, rather than with their neighbours and other local businesses. This mirrors the building of the post-war exurban sprawl of ranch and colonial tract houses in which the majority of the bread and butter customers from whom the resorts made their money lived, entirely self-sufficient developments connected to one another by highways, not footpaths or public transportation. By 1975, the downtown Las Vegas of Fremont Street had begun to more closely resemble the sprawl of the strip than a conventional Central Business District, and the transformation of the modern gaming establishment into an incontrovertibly suburban and mall-like phenomenon, rather than a mere business on a city street, was confirmed, a trend which Schwartz sees echoed in the casinos of New Jersey, Connecticut and elsewhere.

The great strength of this study lies in Schwartz’s ability to seamlessly blend the stories of American suburbanization and the Nevada, and later national, gaming industry. The many fact and figures, and architectural details which the book contains add to the seeming exhaustiveness of the analysis of the changing physical environment of the casino, and the transformation of the early oases among the dust and scrub of the Los Angeles highway into the staggering Disney-esque behemoths of today. It is extremely accessible for an academic study and deserves wide readership among those who study the twentieth century US, architectural history, and the post-modern condition.