Living Las Vegas

Real Life in the Shadow of the Strip

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Top Vegas Hotels: Bellagio, Luxor, Rio

Roads from the Ashes: An Odyssey in Real Life on the Virtual Frontier, by Megan Edwards

Hail, Elvis and Joe!

You might think that everyone in Vegas is out doing something Elvis-related today, the 30th anniversary of the King’s death. Around 75 Vegans, however, were out celebrating something much more mundane. I was one of the small throng present at the 9:00 a.m. opening of a new Trader Joe’s supermarket on the south side of town…

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Something Old… Who Knew?

“There’s nothing old in Vegas.” How many times have you heard it?” “Everything gets blown down.” Well, it’s true when it comes to the Stardust, the Dunes, the Landmark, the Desert Inn… Yeah, a lot of stuff in Vegas really does bite the dust rather explosively. But not everything. Some of it gets moved to the Clark County Museum…

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The Springs Preserve

The Springs Preserve is open. About a decade in the planning and building, this new attraction occupies the spot where water first made the Vegas Valley attractive to human settlers. Billed as the Las Vegas version of New York’s Central Park, the Springs Preserve was…

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Days of Wine and Mobsters

Las Vegas is in love with its mobsters. Even though anyone who has ever read the slightest tidbit of Las Vegas history knows that Bugsy Siegel didn’t found the place, he gets the credit. And not only that, he gets the glory and romance. The most commonly repeated cliché in Vegasland is, “Things were so much better when the mob ran this place.” …

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Book Review: Cullotta

Cullotta: The Life of a Chicago Criminal, Las Vegas Mobster, and Government Witness, by Dennis N. Griffin and Frank Cullotta

I can’t say I was dying to read this book. Sure, mobsters make great cinema, and sure, I watched the last episode of “The Sopranos” along with the rest of the country. But I still don’t find hit men very appealing, and that’s what Frank Cullotta is, an old killer who ratted out his former cohorts when it looked like he was going to get the same bullet-in-the-head treatment he’d been dishing out himself…

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