Las Vegas has been a lot of things over the years from railroad whistlestop to a global tourist destination.

Now as the city works to emerge from the pandemic, how will it reinvent itself again?

The past and future of Las Vegas-- that's this week on Nevada Week.

♪♪♪ Support for Nevada Week is provided by Senator William H. Hernstadt and additional supporting sponsors.

(Kipp Ortenburger) Welcome to Nevada Week.

Well, the city of Las Vegas started its life in 1905, and since then it has soared to become one of the top travel destinations.

Since its early days, Las Vegas has been known for both reinventing itself and weathering economic and cultural storms.

What can Las Vegas' unique history tell us about the present?

Well, joining us to look at Las Vegas' past reincarnations and ahead to what might be in the future are Bob Stoldal, chair of the City of the Las Vegas Historic Preservation Commission; retired Senator Richard Bryan; Michael Green, associate professor of history at UNLV, and Jarmilla McMillian-Arnold, former member of the Las Vegas Historic Preservation Commission.

Thank you all so much for being here; we really appreciate it.

As I mentioned before we started, I'm very excited about this conversation, and I want to start with the most immediate thing here.

We're making history right now.

This has been such a challenging time.

Let's talk about this.

I wanted to ask you all, and Senator Bryan, I want to start with you.

Does history and knowing our history become more important when we are confronting what we've been confronting over the last 18 months?

(Richard Bryan) Well, you know, sometimes history repeats itself, so I think there are valuable lessons in the past, and there's certain milestones that we've had.

Las Vegas has had an upward flight for some period of time.

The dynamics have changed a great deal in recent years.

We surpassed Reno in 1960 as far as the most populous, but there have been periodic recessions and periodic deep recessions, and one of the things I think each one of those has pointed out is that notwithstanding the best efforts of governors like Grant Sawyer and others, we're still somewhat a single-industry community, gaming slash resort, although there's been enormous progress in bringing other business entities in.

It's just that the resort industry has grown so much more rapidly that when we had the recession that was recently, Las Vegas gets hurt far worse than Reno, and frankly, one of the worst in the country in terms of unemployment and dislocation.

-And we have to go back to when you were governor.

I know those were big priorities for you, diversifying the economy.

We're still having those conversations too.

-But you can go back to the 19th century with the mining boom with the Comstock Lode.

Nevada's population was about 45,000, and then we had the flurry of activity at Goldfield and Tonopah in the first and second decades of the 20th century, and that played out.

There have been a lot of innovations.

I mean, the change in social mores in America came with the early residents in Nevada expanding the grounds for divorce, in my time basically mental cruelty.

Even in the '60s in New York state, that's not exactly the heart of the Bible Belt, adultery was the only grounds for divorce.

But that generated a big industry, the divorce industry, and Reno was first to capture that.

Pat McCarran, later our United States Senator, and for a while yet still the airport's named after him, he met Mary Pickford, the great silent film star of the '20s.

She came to Nevada to get a divorce so she could marry another Hollywood icon, Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.

So that was kind of the way we responded, and we've tried to do that in different ways in different times.

-Yes.

Bob, I want to get your take here, too.

I mean, as Senator Bryan mentioned, the divorce law brought so much tourism as well, which then grew a tourism industry.

Let's go back though to where we are now and why history is so important.

I mean, are there key things that are really important to us understanding, to understand where we are and where we're going now?

(Bob Stoldal) Well, the community, we can start with a real short version of the history of the community.

In 1905 we were a railroad town, and we were a railroad town for the next couple of decades with a background of attempting to be an agricultural community.

That stayed its course until the dam in the 1930s.

In 1929-1930 this town changed overnight, and the dam brought us and continues to bring us today important parts of our history.

The hospitality, the tourist industry was started primarily because the dam people wanted to come and see this dam being built and afterwards, and we needed restaurants.

We needed restaurants or hotels and those kinds of things in the '30s.

And then of course we legalized gambling, and as the senator talked about, the divorces.

But those were things that were down here a nice layer.

They were wonderful for the attorneys that were in town at that time.

You move to the '40s, and we became the defense industry when the Las Vegas Army Gunnery School became Nellis Air Force Base, and Basic Magnesium became the town of Henderson.

All those things impacted the community, but again, it was the hospitality industry.

And I think today, we are changing.

We have added industry to this town, and that industry is sports.

It's the Raiders.

It's the Golden Knights.

It's the AAA team, and they're looking and we may get a baseball team.

That's a separate industry.

Yes, it slides in nicely with the hospitality industry, but whether it's in Henderson where the Raiders are, it's a whole separate silo, a big silo, and of course you have the warehouse industry in town.

North Las Vegas just announced this month some additional warehousing.

Amazon is big here, so there are-- but there's something that's going to be on the level of gambling and the hotel industry probably, but that needs to work itself out as well.

Finally you're hearing this month the north end of the Las Vegas Strip is finally going to be.

But I took an aerial look at the city this morning.

What are the two vacant lots that are still on the Las Vegas Strip?

The El Rancho Vegas and the Last Frontier.

The two beginning ones.

It started in '41 or '42.

Those are the two vacant spots on the Las Vegas Strip.

I don't know whether that's-- we won't read anything into that.

But the future of Las Vegas, the Strip is going to be-- is going to settle down I think in the next 12 months.

The ownerships will change.

They'll finish the resort there, and then I don't think we're going to see any major building on the Las Vegas Strip for a long time.

I think we're going to get settled in, the ownership will clean all those places up, get the owners in and then move forward.

-And let's talk about that.

I mean, you're mentioning new opportunities, new challenges.

Obviously new ownership of casinos is a big part of that.

Jarmilla, I want to go to you.

Let's go all the way back to 1918.

I mean, we dealt with our own pandemic then.

We dealt with the Spanish flu.

Of course as we've already been talking about, Las Vegas is completely different than it was then, hopefully more resilient.

What can we learn maybe from that era of the pandemic to better understand where we are now?

(Jarmilla McMillian-Arnold) Well, I think what we're doing now is that we need to understand that vaccinations and the creation of vaccinations are important.

You had pandemic back then.

You have to create vaccinations.

Vaccinations have to be tested.

They have been tested now, and for some reason people seem to be afraid to become vaccinated.

And I was speaking with Bob earlier, and to me it's a choice of dying or being vaccinated.

I'm not ready to die, okay?

So I would prefer to be vaccinated so I have something to assist me through this pandemic as maybe they didn't have back in the 1800s and 1900s.

The other part of that is why is it still so difficult for the communities, the black and the brown communities?

I mean, we should have vaccination sites in there daily so people can go.

We should have doctors.

Even our own black doctors should be there to help the people of the community to understand that this vaccination is safe.

Now you have a vaccination for children, okay?

It's been tested.

Children should be vaccinated.

That's another issue for school.

To me, children should be vaccinated.

Just like you require measles, you require chicken pox, you require polio, so you require the COVID vaccination for children so they can go back to school and enjoy their friends.

They can be more progressive in their learning and not be at home and go through some of the trials and tribulations that they go through.

-Absolutely, Jarmilla, great point.

Michael, I want to come to you.

I mean, this brings up another point here.

We're not only talking about COVID, we're also talking about some things that have been exacerbated by COVID, and of course in addition to that, we've seen racial injustice, protests that have happened in the city, but we have seen maybe some also racial and ethnic disparities here.

Again, these are things that are nothing new to our history.

Can you connect our past to our present there?

(Michael Green) Well, it's interesting that when you had the Spanish flu pandemic, that was about the time there was the first attempt to start an NAACP chapter here.

I don't think it's connected per se, it actually began before the pandemic, but this goes back in American history to the history of enslavement and to the various treatments over the years and experiments that were done.

So you have this history of racial injustice and you say well, all right, Las Vegas, it's such a new place.

It isn't as if you hit the California line, you're in Nevada, and suddenly you think totally differently.

And what makes this interesting is this area has historically kind of been a laboratory because you have so many people moving in from other places.

We're often seen as a bellwether politically, socially, that sort of thing, and our problems in dealing with COVID as an example, well, we shut down the Strip.

Still one of the most amazing moments to me was driving on a Friday night, going over the Strip and it's totally dark.

But if someone says well, why don't we open up?

Who's going to come here?

It's a reminder of our dependence on other places.

It's a reminder of our dependence on history generally.

We have had these problems over the years.

How have we addressed them?

When Senator Bryan was Governor Bryan and economic diversification was a major issue, that was also the time of a recession where, as I remember the story, the senator, as governor, had to change how we collect gaming revenue to meet the state payroll.

That was innovative, that was different for us, and we need to respond in ways that say all right, we're going to try something different.

It may not be that different because one of us will pop up and say oh, you did that in '48 or whatever, but we think it's different today.

Great, try it.

-Well, Senator, let's talk about that a little.

What's maybe the secret sauce we need to maybe remember back in that day, these factors, because we do.

We have all these different times, we've talked about them already, of how we've been able to reinvent ourselves.

What really is at the key of that?

Is it one specific element or maybe a handful of things?

-You know, I think there's an element in Las Vegas that-- unique may not be the right term-- but there is in this community and has been as long as I can remember and probably before that, there's a synergy.

We have a lot of new people coming in, dynamic, capable, exciting, and we've got, you know, the founding fathers and mothers and people who've been part of the business community.

What makes Las Vegas somewhat unique is there's not this resistance.

You know, you have to pay your dues.

You know, maybe in four or five years, we can put you on the board of the Chamber of Commerce.

There's kind of this synergy of welcome, if you've got talent, you get plugged into the various political and business organizations.

That dynamic I think has really been extremely helpful because you have people coming into this community with dynamic new ideas, experience, background, and they're embraced by the leadership structure, and you don't see that in a lot of other communities.

And there's some differences between Las Vegas and Northern Nevada on that kind of an issue.

-The other thing that brings-- it's the energy of Las Vegas but there's one other thing, and that's water.

That's why they stopped the trains here in the first place, and with the building of the dam, and water is clearly-- I don't want to say something so obvious to everybody-- water is our future, and it's cloudy.

I don't know how many more people we can squeeze into the Las Vegas Valley.

We're not going to see a lot of-- any more major Strip hotels being built.

There's enough for right now, other than fixing these.

We talked about the north end.

But it's going to get drier, and it's going to get hotter.

It's not going to go the other way, and are we really prepared for that future?

Right now it's development, it's development, it's development.

Come on, folks.

I already live here.

I already have a house here, so am I saying don't anybody else come to Las Vegas?

No.

We need to have something organized and something that looks to the next 10 years and 15 years.

I want my sons to be part of the answer as to what we do, and it's got to be water we got to focus on.

-And if I can stop you.

Michael, I want to bring you in here because this is such an interesting part of our history because we were allotted so little water, and a lot of the entrepreneurial spirit, but the vision that we have and the way that we can work together and be innovative has built Las Vegas on such a small amount of water.

How important is that then to our future, that same spirit to drive us forward?

-Oh, that spirit is incredibly important.

But, you know, you go back, we had an underground water supply.

It bubbled up at what's now the Springs Preserve, and we managed to use all of it.

It's a remarkable achievement, frankly, and nobody really thought we were going to need that much Hoover Dam-- or water from Lake Mead and Hoover Dam.

And so all right, what's the spirit?

In the 1960s we had two U.S.

Senators, Alan Bible and Howard Cannon, both Democrats tight with Lyndon Johnson.

They brought up the Southern Nevada Water Project.

Now, there had been Lake Mead water pumped in for Basic Magnesium in the '40s.

I think that was the first time any was pumped into the valley, but all right, how much more can we pump?

Well, you look at that bathtub ring, and the answer is not much.

So do we have to be innovative in terms of how we use what we have?

We've actually done pretty well with the Southern Nevada Water Authority, and over the years, Pat Mulroy was the person who ran it for many years.

-Yes, but I mean, that whole plan that we're going to spend $20 billion to suck water out of Ely and bring it down here, and that innovative thinking is-- -Not.

-I think we passed the rubicon on that, Bob.

That just is not realistic.

But I think to the point, there is a challenge in terms of water.

There is a serious challenge, and there's technology that's available.

Maybe there's increased storage in Lake Mead, reductions in some of the agricultural industry in Southern California, that's a major.

I mean, we get 300,000 acre feet a year, they get 4.4 million.

Now, you can say well, were our representatives asleep at the switch?

Cut them a little slack.

I mean, there was probably 2,500 people in Las Vegas.

I mean, what was their argument?

I mean, I don't think anybody would suggest that somebody could have been there and argued we need something on the order of what California gets.

-And there was a story in the paper recently, and I won't name the hotels, but it says it's okay.

The big pool of water we have out there, that's coming from our own aquifer.

What does that mean, their own aquifer?

-They like the term "gray water."

I don't really want to jump into gray water.

But it's an interesting thing to think about because defeating that pipeline, you had Native Americans, environmentalists and ranchers who usually you don't invite to the same party.

-And the LDS church was active in that.

-The MX, the missile in late '70s and early '80s, you had a dissimilar set of strange bedfellows.

And when Senator Bryan was Governor Bryan, the legislature was less partisan.

The Senate that you entered was less partisan than it became, and it's an interesting thing where you will have an infrastructure bill where we have members of Congress saying, isn't it great that they're going to fix the highway in my town, and the response is why did you vote against it?

Well, not everything is politics, but everything's political and there are ways to work together that do not involve the Democratic and Republican parties or any other.

-It's more difficult today.

-It certainly is.

-It's much more difficult, and it's reflected obviously in the Nevada Legislature.

When I first went there in '69, we didn't have an organized caucus, a caucus fundraiser, caucus meetings to decide what our position is.

Today the caucus is a major fundraiser and, frankly, members of caucus, Democrat or Republican, if they're not supportive of the caucus, they're probably not in line to get as much financial help with their next campaign.

I think it's unfortunate, and you're right.

There was virtually no partisanship.

The issues were philosophical, abortion then as now, but that was a philosophical issue.

Sectional, whether the medical school should go to Reno or should wait another few years and let it go to Las Vegas.

Those were sectional.

But by and large, I can't think of any issue other than those kinds of things that drove the differences.

Today a friend of mine in the legislature was telling me he had lunch with a Republican-- this goes back a couple of sessions-- and guy went after lunch, first question, are you thinking about changing your party?

What?

Having lunch?

It's unfortunate.

-Well, one thing we've already been talking about a little bit is the federal relief that's coming to our state in recovery of COVID.

Jarmilla, I want to talk to you about this.

Obviously it's very complex even in deciding how to use federal funding to move our state in the right direction and to move our municipality in Las Vegas in the right direction.

I want to get your perspective on our future.

Let's talk about post-pandemic.

We're hopeful that this is ending now.

We're moving into recovery.

Based on our past history, how good do you feel about our future?

-Actually, I think our future is probably pretty good.

But as far as there are still issues regarding-- I guess I could say segregation or racism.

There's still those issues.

They're probably not as blatant as they were in the '60s, but they're still here.

There's also-- you talk about money coming in to build and restore, there's also, which I still have not been able to understand, sits West Las Vegas.

Now, I'm talking about from Bonanza all the way down over to what is now Martin Luther King Boulevard, used to be Highland, over there.

I'm talking about-- that's West Las Vegas.

All of a sudden everything has been just demolished, and I'm looking at flatland and two or three churches.

Well, the two churches basically that I know of would be historic, and that's Victory and Second Baptist.

They've been there since I came here, and I was nine when I came here so they've been here for a while.

But, you know, that money as far as building roads and streets, et cetera, you know, again, you're going to talk about dividing that money up.

Who's going to divide that money up?

Who's going to oversee that money?

How much of that money is going to go to the Strip?

How much of that money is going to go to West Las Vegas to help their streets or put in street lights or help build up that community for somebody, an architect or designer to develop something to do with that land?

That's probably the best land.

That land sits the highest in this valley.

Sits the highest.

I mean, you can drive West Las Vegas and look over everything.

It's a good piece of land.

It has never been developed.

It's still empty.

So I guess that's fine.

-Yes, 100%, and obviously a big need to redevelop parts of the Westside.

I wish we had more time.

Unfortunately, we don't.

But listen, one of the most fascinating aspects of Southern Nevada history and that unique mix of opportunity and vision is nuclear testing and what was once called the Nevada Test Site.

Well, the Nevada Week team checked out the Atomic Testing Museum, which works to preserve that part of our state's history.

Las Vegas continually reinvents itself to attract visitors, sometimes in rather unique ways.

In 1951 as the Cold War heated up, Las Vegas' tourism industry capitalized on nuclear testing taking place 65 miles out of town at the Nevada Test Site.

Tourists came to see bombs explode.

(Darwin Morgan) They would drive guests out into the desert so that they could watch the mushroom clouds as they grew from the site.

(bomb exploding) It was all part of the glitz and glamour of Las Vegas.

People would come here to gamble and watch the nuclear bombs, and it was a part of the culture of the 1950s that the gaming industry embraced.

In time health and safety concerns and public outcry led to the end of atomic tourism.

The testing at the Nevada Test Site continued for decades.

They ended up doing a total of 828 nuclear tests out there-- 928 nuclear tests-- 828 underground tests and 100 atmospheric tests.

Relics from those tests can be found at Las Vegas' National Atomic Testing Museum.

Today people get to see what happened out at the site.

They get to understand why the United States was doing nuclear weapons testing, both in the Pacific and here, so people have an understanding of this piece of history that was integral to Southern Nevada's formation.

The National Atomic Testing Museum offers collection-based exhibits, learning activities and an intense simulation of an atmospheric nuclear test.

People get to feel the rumbling of the ground.

They feel the air rushing so they're feeling the shockwave as it's coming past them.

So people like that.

Las Vegas visitor Thomas Wright came to town to see a concert and was then drawn to the National Atomic Testing Museum.

(Thomas Wright) I wasn't aware that the testing was so close to here.

I always thought it was all in New Mexico.

So when I saw the museum, I thought well, that's interesting.

It's interesting for people that like things a little bit out of the ordinary.

Las Vegas' National Atomic Testing Museum is an out-of-the-ordinary place that shares an extraordinary history, and the museum has collected so many items that it hopes to expand into a larger Las Vegas location.

For Nevada Week, I'm Heather Caputo.

Thanks, Heather.

I want to thank our guests, Bob Stoldal with the Las Vegas Historic Preservation Commission, former Senator Richard Bryan, Michael Green from UNLV and a member of the Las Vegas Historic Preservation Commission and Jarmilla McMillan-Arnold.

Thank you so much.

And thank you of course as always for joining us this week on Nevada Week.

For any of the resources discussed on this show, please visit our website at vegaspbs.org/nevadaweek.

You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter at @nevadaweek.

Thanks again, and we'll see you next week.

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