A DESERT TRIBUTE.(Brief Article)

When the New York-New York Hotel and Casino opened in Las Vegas, five years ago, the absence of the World Trade Center towers from the resort's ersatz skyline seemed like a reasonable omission, the kind of messing around with reality that is to be expected from a city where a volcano spews lava on schedule every evening, and where a Venetian canal, complete with singing gondoliers, can be found one flight up from a rattling casino floor. New York-New York does include a squat forty-seven-story replica of the Empire State Building; a scaled-down Chrysler Building that is significantly less shiny than the real thing, on account of its being topped with fibreglass rather than steel; a slice of Lever House; and a massively oversized Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument that seems designed to perplex visiting New Yorkers, who are not sure they've ever noticed the real thing. When the hotel was built, its developers explained away the missing Twin Towers by suggesting that the complex was supposed to evoke a Manhattan of the nineteen-forties; and, if that does not quite account for why, at the foot of the diminutive replica of the Brooklyn Bridge, one can find the ESPN Zone,it should be remembered that, even in Jazz Age New York, commerce was occasionally known to trump integrity.

Last Wednesday, a resilient commitment to commerce was demonstrated by the management of New York-New York, even as the horrible reconfiguring of the real New York skyline, in accordance with its desert simulacrum, was memorialized. It was decided that the terrorists would have won if the tourists were deprived of their opportunity to lose, so the casino--an indoor version of Central Park, filled with one-armed bandits instead of rollerbladers--remained open. But the solemnity of the day was marked nonetheless. Toward noon, a large crowd gathered at the intersection of Tropicana Avenue and the Strip, where a hundred-and-fifty-foot replica of the Statue of Liberty surveys a miniaturized New York Harbor, in which two scaled-down fireboats spray water over a nonexistent inferno. This spot has, during the past year, become an unofficial memorial to the events that befell the real New York, New York: T-shirts from fire departments across the country have been hung over the harbor railings, many bearing ...