Dr. David Schwartz' excellent book on the origins of Las Vegas style casino. Essential!

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Product Description

Suburban Xanadu is a new look at the rise of the casino industry, one of the most remarkable developments in late 20th century America. Within a generation, casinos went from near-outlaw businesses to thriving, state-sanctioned ones. Suburban Xanadu clearly and emphatically tells the story of how this happened, doing, in the words of casino mogul Steve Wynn, a "great job" of explaining casinos' popularity..

This isn't the casino history you've seen on TV. For too long, academic historians have shied away from seriously investigating the social, cultural, and political forces that created today's casino industry. Finally, someone has crafted an artful, accessible historical analysis of the rise and popularity of legal casino gaming in the United States.

Crime, corruption, exoticism, escapism, family entertainment, and egalitarianism-all under one roof. The lures and promises of the casino have evolved dramatically over the course of the past century, and the suburban oasis of today's casino resort is hardly the den of iniquity castigated by anti-gambling critics or romanticized by casino operators. Today, we live in a veritable "casino archipelago" in which most Americans live within a four-hour drive of one of the all-inclusive hotel/restaurant/and entertainment complexes. So what are the forces behind this phenomenon?

Tracing the evolution of the casino resort from its roots in the post-World War II domestic urban exodus, Suburban Xanadu argues that the self-contained casino resort arose at precisely the right historical moment. Having shuttled and shuttered gambling and its social problems away from cities and into the more sanitized cultural and physical landscape of middle America, the casino resort evolved into a quintessential American institution. Remarkably detailed and entertaining, Suburban Xanadu tells us a great deal about popular leisure in America and why the suburban ideal has become so dominant in our social life.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1321369 in Books
• Published on: 2003-07-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Review
Suburban Xanadu is an important addition to what we know about America's most exciting and controversial city. Dave Schwartz peels back myth to get to the heart of what really makes Las Vegas tick. A must for anyone who cares about culture in the new century!.
–Hal Rothman, author of Neon Metropolis: How Las Vegas Started the Twenty-First Century

Suburban Xanadu is an important addition to what we know about Americas most exciting and controversial city. Dave Schwartz peels back myth to get to the heart of what really makes Las Vegas tick. A must for anyone who cares about culture in the new century!.
–Hal Rothman, author of Neon Metropolis: How Las Vegas Started the Twenty-First Century

Suburban Xanadu tells the fascinating story of the rise of casinos on the Las Vegas Strip--something that has been much needed. Using the extensive Gaming Collection at UNLV, Dave Schwartz shows us that the popularity of casinos is no accident, but part of larger trends in American history. He approaches the topic with intelligence and thoughtfulness, and the result is a book that does a great job of explaining why Americans like casino resorts so much.
–Steve Wynn, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of Wynn Resorts

A must for anyone who cares about culture in the new century! -- Hal Rothman, author of Neon Metropolis

A scholarly yet colorful take on a phenomenon that has never before garnered such a thorough examination. -- Las Vegas City Life, September 17, 2003

Highly Recommended! ...a colorful and authoritative reading of the history of casino resort development in the United States. -- John Hannigan, author of Fantasy City

Highly Recommended! Suburban Xanadu is a colorful and authoritative reading of the history of casino resort development in the United States. Schwartz's thesis--that Las Vegas in the 1950s and 1960s was brilliantly marketed as a safe vacation adventure for middle Americans trapped within everyday lives of conservatism and conformity--is both perceptive and spot-on.
–John Hannigan, author of Fantasy City: Pleasure and Profit in the Postmodern Metropolis

Highly Recommended! Suburban Xanadu is a colorful and authoritative reading of the history of casino resort development in the United States. Schwartzs thesis--that Las Vegas in the 1950s and 1960s was brilliantly marketed as a safe vacation adventure for middle Americans trapped within everyday lives of conservatism and conformity--is both perceptive and spot-on.
–John Hannigan, author of Fantasy City: Pleasure and Profit in the Postmodern Metropolis

Schwartz eschews the hype, formulating a sophisticated thesis that is very compelling. -- Las Vegas Mercury, November 6, 2003.

Tells the fascinating story of the rise of casinos on the Las Vegas Strip--something that has been much needed. -- Steve Wynn, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of Wynn Resorts

From the Publisher
David G. Schwartz of the University of Nevada Las Vegas tears down myth to create an honest, accurate history of the casino industry.

While the history of Las Vegas-style casino resorts is relatively brief, dating only to the 1940s, these institutions are fascinating subjects for historical study. Working from the assumption that the men and women who operated and vacationed in Strip casinos were "more or less rational people acting to maximize their profit," Schwartz examines the conditions that led to the first flowering of the casino industry outside of Las Vegas in the late 1940s and explains how a variety of factors aided the growth of the Strip through the 1990s. When other states tried to use casinos to provide economic stimuli, however, they often ignored the fact that casino resorts were specific adaptations to the conditions of a suburban strip in an isolated city, and not blueprints for urban redevelopment.

Schwartz, acclaimed by Casino Design magazine as "gaming’s leading historian, rewrites the standard history of casinos, bringing to light many previously ignored facts about the resorts of the Strip and elsewhere. Some of Schwartz’s major points include the following:

"neither casino operators nor patrons are fundamentally deviant, but are in fact more or less rational people acting to maximize their profit and vacation value, respectively." (2)

As they have been developed on the Strip, casino resorts are incompatible with classic urban downtowns (6-7)

The popularity of illegal urban slots in the 1940s doomed them to extinction in the 1950s, and paved the way for the growth of the Las Vegas Strip as a vacation destination. (22)

The first casino resort on the Strip, the Hotel El Rancho Vegas, opened in April 1941, over five years before the more famous Flamingo. (34)

The first themed Strip casino, the western Last Frontier, opened in 1942. (44)

Hollywood restaurateur Billy Wilkerson, not the infamous Bugsy Siegel, was the actual founder of the Flamingo Hotel. (52)

The anti-gambling campaigns of Estes Kefauver and others in the early 1950s actually boosted Las Vegas by eliminating the competition. (72)

Syndicate ownership, not sole proprietorship, was the norm for early casinos. (104)

Casinos had strict accounting procedures and controls as far back as the 1940s, long before the so-called "corporate takeover" in the 1970s. (114)

Conventions, not its reputation as "Sin City," made Las Vegas a leading destination in the 1960s. (134)

The rebirth of casino theming with Caesars Palace in 1966 was rooted in fiscal necessity and made solid economic sense. (136)

Long-building economic trends, not Howard Hughes’s whim to buy up available casinos, led to the arrival of corporate casino ownership in the late 1960s. (151)

The successes and shortcomings of casinos in places like Atlantic City and Mississippi can be directly traced to their evolution on the suburban Las Vegas

Strip. (181)

Internet gaming will change the landscape of legal American gambling: "The containment of casinos in space, strained by the expansion of [terrestrial] casinos…completely collapsed with the introduction of Internet gaming. (213)

From the Author
I wrote this book to provide an honest account of the rise of the casino industry. If you want a real history of the Las Vegas Strip that is well-documented and occasionally amusing, check this out. If you read the book and liked it, I would be very grateful for your posting a review.

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Customer Reviews

The author hits the jackpot!
The author, a professor and coordinator of the Gaming Studies Research Center at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, really hits the jackpot with this, his first publication. Although I am a financial analyst, specializing in the gaming industry, I was intrigued by Dr. Schwartz's historical analysis of the development of legalized gaming in Las Vegas and throughout the United States. The book is extremely well-researched and, while clearly written by a scholar, it has a friendly, accessible style. Suburban Xanadu has something for those interested in business, American history, popular culture, gaming, "the Rat Pack," sociology, etc. I have recommended this book to my colleagues and I look forward to reading future works from this unique young author.

Historical Excellence
Most writings on casino life in the U.S. are larded with celebrity vignettes, unsubstantiated data, and airy fluff. But David Schwartz has produced a well-researched, carefully documented, clearly written historical account of Las Vegas casino culture from its inception in the early 1930s to the present. His carefully contextualized work shows how changing currents in American cultural life and leisure preferences shaped the style, architecture, and budgetary considerations of those who aimed to profit from casino ownership in an improbable desert environment. One learns from his book of the risk involved in such investments, and how the famous Las Vegas strip has always rested on unsteady financial and political pylons. Finally we have a solid, fascinating historical account of the casino industry and its consumers.

Excellent History
David Schwartz has written a persuasive explanation of the success of post-World War II casino resorts in Las Vegas. In the process, he deftly deals with a number of important elements in that success: the long-time American fascination with gambling, the backgrounds of early casino developers, the evolving themes evident in casinos beginning with Old West motifs, the role of organized crime figures and corporate investment, the rise of megaresorts, casino design, the importance of publicists, and the expansion of legalized gambling across the nation. Most importantly, Schwartz makes a strong case that as post-World War II Americans supported efforts to curb gambling in their locales, they eagerly traveled to Las Vegas in ever larger numbers to gamble in an unthreatening environment provided by the rapidly proliferating casino resorts along the famous "Strip." They were largely middle class suburbanites who "fundamentally wanted to gamble in suburban resorts." Casino developers provided what these affluent Americans wanted: star entertainers, fabulous resort facilities, fine dining, and a chance win money. In short, they offered fantasy and fun in a safe place. Schwartz's account is convincing. Casino developers in Las Vegas have provided Americans with a leisure time experience that is now widely perceived as "socially innocuous and economically beneficial."