Battleborn author Claire Vaye Watkins on growing up an hour west of Las Vegas:

If you looked east at night you’d see a dark mountain range and then the glow of the city of Las Vegas behind it. You could see the lights of the city every single night.

image via math3780/Flickr

Writer Claire Vaye Watkins — author of the short story collection Battleborn — on growing up near Las Vegas, which is where her mother also grew up:

It never felt like, ‘This is my parents’ city,’ It was like, ‘This is my city.’ Partially — probably — because my parents were always talking about how different it was, you know, than when they were around. They would talk about how the Strip looked nothing like when they had worked [there]. My grandma was a change girl at Caesars Palace basically her whole life and her Las Vegas looked nothing like my mother’s Las Vegas and mine, it was very much my own. … [Y]ou [are] absolutely untethered by any convention of legacy — I guess — or history. You have no obligation to anyone in that kind of context — or so it seems when you’re seventeen.

image via Travel Nevada/Flickr

An interesting read over at The Awl about the names of streets and urban development in Las Vegas and what that says about the city, the real estate boom and bust, and Americans, more broadly.

Tupac Lane Welcomes You: The Street Names of Las Vegas:

There’s also Internet Avenue, Purple Haze Street, Anchorman Way (incidentally, near Ferrell Street), and Elvis Alive Drive. There’s Hole in 1 Street, Peaceful Dreams Street, Nature Scene Drive, Exotic Plum Ave, Edifice Avenue, Music Avenue, Backslash Avenue, and Coffee Grinder Court. There’s even a street named for Grand Moff Tarkin. (You know, Grand Moff Tarkin? The guy who built the Death Star and blew up Alderaan with it?)

These are people’s addresses, and while they might be used as mere labels, the apparent carelessness with which the city’s streets have been named reveals the deep lack of civic spirit engendered by the housing boom. The unfortunate fact is that, if you build enough houses, you start to build cities. As anyone who has walked by Canal or Wall Street with his father can tell you, street names offer a connection to a city’s past, a sobering reminder that even the grandest city in the nation was never an inevitability. Well, does Las Vegas’ strange assortment of street names offer any similar lessons?

And on naming previously unnamed West Virginia streets.

Image by Abbey Arnett

Rick Harrison explains why pimps are good jewelry customers: “When you get arrested for pandering, they take your cash — because the cash was obtained illegally — but they don’t take away your jewelry. And a pimp knows that if he buys jewelry in a pawn shop, if [he] brings it back to a pawn shop and gets a loan against it, [they’ll] always get half of what you paid for it — as opposed to buying it in a jewelry store, when [they] don’t know what [they’re] going to get. So, when they get arrested, they will always have someone bring their jewelry down to me. I will loan them half of what they paid for it — and that’s their bail money.” [complete interview here]

Las Vegas Tries To Prevent A Water Shortage (Popular Mechanics, Oct 2009)