The Las Vegas Strip looks like the morning after the end of the world.
On a recent day in late March, the strip was full of advertisements for things that read like transmissions from another planet where the air is easier to breathe.
Andrew Dice Clay wasn’t coming to a big casino theater. There were no nightly tributes to Prince titled Purple Reign. The $7 steak and egg deal in an all-night restaurant would not be available from midnight to 6am.
In front of Caesars Palace, the fountains were dry and still. A stone-faced Caesar gestured from a pedestal as a lone goose waddled down the street, alongside the few passing cars. Gondolas docked at the entrance to the Venetian on still water the color of toilet bowl cleaner.
Most of the businesses on the Vegas Strip and on Fremont Street, the city’s old strip, shut down in mid-March, when Steve Sisolak, the Nevada governor, ordered the closure of all non-essential businesses. (One holdout was Little Darlings, a strip club which defiantly stayed open, advertising “coronavirus-free” dancers and nude hand sanitizer wrestling. They’ve since closed. Their billboard read, “Sorry, we’re clothed,” featuring a photo of a woman in a short, frilly skirt and a cloth face mask, looking over her shoulder in apparent alarm.)
This is the first time the entire strip has been shut down since the JFK assassination; even the devastating mass shooting in 2017 only resulted in a partial closure.
The effects on the local and state economy are expected to be catastrophic. Las Vegas saw 42.5 million visitors in 2019, and the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority estimates that the city hosted 3 million visitors in February alone.
The economic indicators for the state as a whole, which relies just as heavily on tourism, are devastating: the Nevada Resort Association (NVA) has warned the state has lost an estimated $2bn from cancelled meetings and conventions, and could lead to $39bn in economic losses overall. The NVA says that one in three jobs in Nevada are connected to the tourism industry, responsible for $20bn in annual wages and salaries. “No other state in America depends on travel and tourism at the magnitude Nevada does,” the Association warns.
And so Las Vegas has become one of the most striking places in the United States to be able to see the toll the crisis has taken on fun and leisure.
Other tourist destinations that have shut down, such as Disneyland, are closed to visitors, but on the strip stragglers can float across the empty places like they’re scrambling around in the ruins of an empty civilization. Before they closed, the casinos posted goodbye-for-now messages on the digital screens they usually use to welcome guests. They make for a haunting backdrop: “Stay safe, stay strong, we look forward to welcoming you back soon,” from the MGM Grand, and “Doors closed, hearts open” at Palace Station. In a particularly grim twist, many establishments have been using the hashtag #VegasStronger in their signage, since #VegasStrong was already used, in the aftermath of the 2017 shooting. The giant resort hotels behind the casinos are walls of black, every hotel room dark.
The strip and Fremont Street aren’t totally empty, of course. All the left-behind establishments are carefully watched by security guards, some of whom will try to stop photos being taken of a casino with caution tape strung across its entrance. Much of the street is also webbed in construction netting and the sounds of workers hammering during the day, the pause of the pandemic becoming a good time to give the sewer system a facelift. Overnight, police clustered at the intersections and the entrances to the higher end casinos. Unhoused people looked for places to rest and food to eat in empty trash cans.
Vegas, of course, is more than its tourist quarter. When the awful silence from the strip faded away, it was replaced with the hum of life in any major city right now: people riding bikes, walking dogs, cautiously getting groceries.
Some marks of how coronavirus has altered the city, though, are more disturbing than empty casinos or shuttered daiquiri bars. A Catholic Charities-run night shelter temporarily had to close on 25 March, after an employee and a guest both tested positive for the virus (the shelter reopened on 1 April). For a week, people who would have spent the night in the shelter slept instead in a parking lot outside Cashman Field, directly on the concrete, in neatly taped-off rows. Behind them, in the distance, the strip shimmered, the walls of empty hotel rooms safely encased in glass.
