Halloween in Sin City

Downtown Las Vegas is historic Las Vegas, the site of two of the oldest casinos in the city - El Cortez and the Golden Nugget, both of which are still operating - and the first Las Vegas hotel.  It's several blocks of amazing excess, bright as day in the middle of the night.  The Fremont Street Experience is a four-block-long pedestrian mall there of restaurants, stores, and music stages, all covered by a barrel vault LED canopy of absolutely enormous size, billed as the largest video screen in the world, on which spectacular light shows are played nightly.

A Halloween celebration was scheduled there, and party animals that Nancy and I are, we couldn't miss it.  It was crowded, with lots of street performers competing for the partygoers' generosity.

Many of our fellow attendees were in costume.  We came as a couple of hicks from California.

Some of the women were scantily clad.  I spied the first pasties I'd seen since my misspent youth as a medical student in New Orleans.  Three live bands played, with the sound level cranked up to painful.  As the evening wore on the crowds became like Mardi Gras in New Orleans, meaning that moving through them was a painstakingly slow process.  An assault on the senses, but fun.

Downtown Las Vegas is also the site of the Mob Museum, a very well done exhibit about gangs and famous criminals and organized crime in America, with emphasis on its Las Vegas manifestation.  Here I am in a model of the electric chair in Sing Sing.

It's surprising and a bit embarrassing how many famous criminals we are familiar with - from John Dillinger to Lucky Luciano to the late great Whitey Bulger and many many more.  Certainly we remember more crooks than political figures from those times.  We probably have Martin Scorcese and Francis Ford Coppola and other great filmmakers to thank for our obsession with history's bad boys.

The first luxury hotel on the Las Vegas Strip was the Flamingo, built by the gangster Bugsy Siegel, who fell into financial difficulty and began skimming off the top, which led to Meyer Lansky and his fellow investors (allegedly) having him whacked.  Many of the hotel/casinos were mob-connected through most of the city's history but the gambling industry is better regulated today.

The slide motor parts for our motorhome arrived today, and Jeff the mobile RV mechanic made our slide functional, so starting on Sunday we're on our way back toward Santa Cruz.  Hooray!  We stayed in Las Vegas ten days, much longer than originally planned.  It's an interesting place, to say the least, but we're ready to move on.