More recently, Vegas has reacted to the nationwide gambling explosion by turning itself into a collection of family theme parks, just as a new generation has become fascinated by the sinfully swingin' culture Vegas used to symbolize. What's more, Vegas is a thoroughly suburbanized experience, with self-contained resorts strewn down an airport highway. If Vegas is now a city for families, Reno is a city for women, specifically older women. At any given time, any given row of slot machines will be dominated by over-60 ladies emulating the grandmother in Dostoevsky's The Gambler, gleefully losing her fortune at the roulette tables while her decendents impatiently wait for her to die. Porn shops are zoned far from the casino district.
Strip clubs are few and small.
Brown rec-room paneling. Thirty-six TVs, showing every available live game or horse race. They'd come for the old-time American sin and return for the skiing and the National Bowling Stadium. If Reno can reach out to a new generation by building on the best of what it still has, it could thrive again. Southwest Airlines is in many ways the Stranger of passenger air carriers.