DCA Then and Now - Part 1: How to Make an Entrance.

August 19, 2021 by Dave Gottwald

Although I’ve visited the Disneyland Resort many times since, I hadn’t done any actual site documentation there since 2008. In the summer of 2021 I spent four days at the resort catching up as best I could. So much had happened in terms of design changes, particularly in the last decade, that I struggled to capture it all. Ultimately I decided to focus on major new developments, and look at other various alterations with a “then and now” approach.

Postcard from the Edge

The most drastic of these alterations have been made to Disney California Adventure (DCA), which opened to disappointing reviews and lackluster attendance in February, 2001. For years the Disney designers—whose vision had to be drastically scaled back due to corporate budget cuts—were frustrated with the park’s poor performance.

Disney’s California Adventure 2001 park map. Ⓒ Disney Enterprises, Inc.

Put indelicately, this “second gate” at the Disneyland Resort was done on the cheap. Visitors complained that it was a half-day park at best (yet the same price as Disneyland next door) with too many restaurants and not enough attractions. It was built on the site of the former Disneyland parking lot, prompting late Disney Imagineer John Hench to viciously quip, “I liked it better as a parking lot.”

Disney’s California Adventure 2001 souvenir park map poster. Ⓒ Disney Enterprises, Inc.

At opening, DCA was comprised of four lands: Sunshine Plaza, Hollywood Pictures Backlot, Paradise Pier, and Golden State. This last one was divided into six distinct themed areas which the designers referred to as “districts”—Condor Flats, Grizzly Peak Recreation Area, Golden Vine Winery, Bountiful Valley Farm, Pacific Wharf, and The Bay Area.

The shape of California over the original park layout. Underlay map data: Ⓒ Google.

Arguably the only clever concept the original park’s designers came up with was that each of these four lands and six “districts” were laid out together in roughly the shape of the state of California. As my overlay demonstrates, it’s a bit exaggerated and not literal. Yet the locales of the various themed areas align rather well.

Disney California Adventure, satellite view. Click for link. Map data: Ⓒ Google.

In the twenty years since the park has been added on to and modified possibly more than any other theme park on the planet. And these changes started right away. DCA’s original dark ride, Superstar Limo, didn’t even last a whole year. A Bug's Land opened in the fall of 2002. Then more additions in 2004 and 2008. Change after change, right through to the present.

Perhaps the most obnoxious original element was the park’s entrance. I’m not sure what the designers were thinking, but the idea was supposed to be a kind of abstracted journey into a stylized tourist postcard of California. It might have seemed nifty on paper, but as an actual environment it totally flopped.

Which was sort of to be expected. It’s sitting right next to Disneyland! As The Imagineering Field Guide to Disney California Adventure (an official Disney publication) put it honestly, yet delicately:

The park was originally envisioned as a counterpoint to Disneyland—a different offering with a distinct tone and selection of experiences intended to provide variety for guests at the resort. But the proximity of Disneyland pointed out that there are elements of the Disney Park experience at Disney California Adventure—in its original incarnation—did not possess.

The Sun Icon, 2008. — The **Sun Icon**, 2008.

And the park’s original visual magnet, or “wienie” as Walt Disney called it? It was the Sun Icon, which looked like a giant hubcap mounted above a wave fountain. Yes, that was the official name. The Sun Icon. In the 2019 Disney+ streaming series The Imagineering Story, designers like Kevin Rafferty were quite honest in their reappraisal of the mistakes they made. Said Rafferty of the Sun Icon:

Much to our chagrin, it didn’t adhere to our fundamental design principles of theme park design. The first statement that you saw when you walked into the gate was the sharp sun. Frankly you could have seen that at a shopping mall in Newport Beach. It’s like, ‘Why is it here?’

The Sun Icon in Sunshine Plaza, 2008. — The **Sun Icon** in *Sunshine Plaza*, 2008.

The thing was actually so ugly that I took very few pictures of it back in 2008. Here you can see Sunshine Plaza as it was called through the park’s original Golden Gate Bridge.

DCA’s Original Golden Gate Bridge, 2008.

This stretched iconic bridge build around the original Disneyland Monorail track was cartoonish and silly. This is what was supposed to compete with the original Disneyland Park, mere steps away?

Abstracted and bland Sunshine Plaza on 2001 park map. Ⓒ Disney Enterprises, Inc. — Abstracted and bland *Sunshine Plaza* on 2001 park map. Ⓒ Disney Enterprises, Inc.

As I detail in my studio courses in thematic design, in order for these environments to be experientially successful, a degree of immersion is required. And immersion works best when the presentation is literal. In other words, immersion can be measured on a gradient of abstraction. The less abstract (more literal) a space is, the more immersive it will be, and thus the most experientially successful.

This original entrance was a total abstraction. Too garish, too brash, and moreover, didn’t immerse people as they entered the park. The bridge especially comes off like an oversized toy. Honey, I Shrunk the Guests?

DCA original ceramic mural, east side, 2008.

Flanking either side of the bridge was what Disney advertised as the “largest ceramic mural in the world.” This was part of the stylized postcard landscape that guests were supposed to be entering.

DCA original ceramic mural, west side, 2008.

Again I thought the thing was pretty ugly, so I didn’t take many pictures of it. Fortunately, over at Yesterland there is a good record with many detailed close up shots.

Welcome to Buena Vista Street

What DCA needed was an entirely new approach, something thematically appropriate to compliment Disneyland right next door. The designers realized, the only way to compete with the original Disneyland was to compliment it. In 2007 they announced that the park would basically get its very own version of Main Street U.S.A.

Buena Vista Street, satellite view. Click for link. Underlay map data: Ⓒ Google. — *Buena Vista Street*, satellite view. Click for link. Underlay map data: Ⓒ Google.

After extensive planning and two years of construction, an entirely new themed land for Disney California Adventure, Buena Vista Street, opened on June 15, 2012. Sunshine Plaza, the Sun Icon and its wave pool, and the cartoonish Golden Gate Bridge were all torn out. In place of all that now is a detailed and immersive environment—in my opinion some of the most successfully rendered placemaking that the company has ever executed. I will detail this land across two posts.

Buena Vista Street preview event, June 10, 2012. — *Buena Vista Street* preview event, June 10, 2012.

I was actually on Buena Vista Street for a Disneyland Annual Passholder (AP) preview event five days prior to the public opening. Here you can see the construction walls still up.

Organic and pleasant Buena Vista Street on 2021 Park Map. Ⓒ Disney Enterprises, Inc. — Organic and pleasant *Buena Vista Street* on 2021 Park Map. Ⓒ Disney Enterprises, Inc.

The land is named after the street that the Walt Disney Studios is on. Note the powerful use of asymmetrical balance, and how the entry corridor dog-legs to the right and leverages some classic conceal-and-reveal to place the central fountain off to one side. The entire area feels organic, and although spotlessly clean in the Disney fashion, gives the impression of having been built over time.

Pan-Pacific Gate

A new entrance gate and turnstiles for California Adventure had opened exactly one year prior to Buena Vista Street. The original 11 foot high CALIFORNIA letters were relocated to Cal Expo in 2012, the fairground where the 18-day California State Fair is held annually.

Pan-Pacific Auditorium, closed and neglected, mid-seventies. Wikimedia / Public Domain.

The new gate was designed to evoke perhaps the classic example of Streamline Moderne architecture in Los Angeles (and one of the finest ever to be built in the United States), the Pan-Pacific Auditorium. It’s an inspired choice, as the structure was designed by LA architectural firm Wurdeman and Becket. Welton Becket, you’ll recall, was the neighbor of Walt Disney who advised him to hire his own “Hollywood people” and form his own in-house design consultancy (WED Enterprises, later Walt Disney Imagineering). In the late 1960s, Welton Becket Associates designed Disney’s Contemporary Hotel at Walt Disney World (WDW).

After closing in 1972, the Pan-Pacific Auditorium fell into decay and finally burned down in 1989.

Looking closely you can see how well the designers adapted the contours of the auditorium. But are guests fully immersed? Not yet. This is just a bit of Streamline moderne, with only tenuous aesthetic connection to what lies inside.

Then again the entry gates of Disneyland across the way only begin to suggest a Victorian Gingerbread styling that will be more fully realized once inside the park. It’s a tease, and it doesn’t make literal sense in the context of the design of Main Street U.S.A. The same could be said for DCA’s new entrance.

Pan-Pacific Auditorium entrance to Disney-MGM Studios, 2007.

This wasn’t a new idea however. When Disney-MGM Studios (now Disney's Hollywood Studios) opened back in May of 1989 at Walt Disney World, the park featured a nearly identical entrance gate (ironically this was just three weeks before the original auditorium would burn down). One major difference is that the Studios park gate includes ticket sales windows and also functioning neon. The same structural motif is also used for the more recently built entrance to the Disney's Hollywood Studios parking lot. As we’ll see, this isn’t the only element that the design team would lift from that Florida park.

Continued in Part 2.

Viva Las Vegas - Part 3: Learning from Shanghai?

August 06, 2021 by Dave Gottwald

To finish out the posts on my reinvestigation of Las Vegas, I’m concluding with perhaps the most significant development on The Strip since the 1990s. And that’s been the very deliberate (and very expensive, and likely very profitable) rebranding of Sin Sity as a true urban landscape, a “destination city.” This seems to be in order appeal to a more international (and largely affluent, quite Chinese) tourist audience.

In short, Las Vegas is Learning from Shanghai.

CityCenter complex, Las Vegas Strip, satellite view. Click for link. Map data: Ⓒ Google.

My pun refers, of course, to the rather famous study by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour in which they asked the architectural community what might be learned from studying the design of the Las Vegas Strip. And Vegas has learned, to. Once it was from Disney. But that era (1985–1995 at its peak, with thematic rumblings well into the 00s) appears to be winding down.

At the heart of this new rebrand is CityCenter.

CityCenter under construction, July 2008.

The prior time I had conducted site research in the summer of 2008, construction was well underway. The final price tag for this 76 acre, mixed-use urban complex was about $9.2 billion, making it the largest privately funded construction project in U.S. history, Fittingly, Walt Disney World once held that title.

Seeing those towers arise out of The Strip, surrounded by all the other themed casinos struck me as super surreal. At first it felt like just another theme, as if this was a Blade Runner (1982) techno future kind of thing.

A kind of future, certainly. Managed by AECOM Tishman, the project was a collaboration between eight world-renowned architects and MGM Mirage (now MGM Resorts International) and is the largest LEED-certified project in the world (six Gold certifications). But also, like Blade Runner itself, it represents something of a dystopia.

For example, the rounded tower being built above no longer exists. Very serious construction defects in The Harmon were discovered that year I visited, and work stopped. The tower was deemed unsalvageable; they started tearing it town in the summer of 2014 and a little over a year later it was gone.

The CityCenter project could not have opened at a worse time. When it was announced in 2004, things looked great. Then global economy tanked in the fall of 2008, and the response when doors swung open in December, 2009 was a collective yawn (and, in investor circles, a whole lot of sweating).

MGM’s initial financial partner during the construction phase was Dubai World, who was also racked by the Great Recession. However, things are now on the mend. Just this summer, MGM announced they were buying out Dubai World’s stake (to the tune of over $2.1 billion), giving them full ownership of the Aria and Vdara resorts on the property. MGM then plans to sell the hotels off, and lease them, turning a longer-term profit on their investment.

It looks almost like a model, doesn’t it? Or a CGI background from a sci-fi streaming series. When initially pitched, the project was described by MGM as a “self-contained city-within-a-city.” Walking around deep inside, looking up at only modern skyscrapers, it certainly felt that way. Like being inside a Disney park surrounded by an earthen berm, you can’t see the rest of Las Vegas outside CityCenter.

The dystopian Detroit of 1987’s Robocop was also fresh in my mind. Concrete and steel, abstract and angular. Almost a postmodern take on brutalism. It’s so out there, and so not what I expect from Las Vegas.

I won’t digress too much here into cinematic subsumption, which I’ve blogged about before and also have expounded upon in scholarly journals [here] and [here] with my writing partner Greg Turner-Rahman. But basically, the built environment (and by extension, our very lives) has been completely colonized (or “subsumed”) by the language of cinema. I’ve mentioned feeling like CityCenter is Blade Runner or Robocop. Looking up at this particular building, all I could think about was The Towering Inferno (1974). This is an aside, but I’ll be returning to it in future posts: movies change the way we experience the built environment.

So who was this Postmodern Sci-Fi Future Tech City built for? It wasn’t movie fans. As Stefan Al describes it in his fantastic The Strip: Las Vegas and the Architecture of the American Dream, this new approach is what he calls “Cosmopolitanism” and it’s aimed squarely at the international leisure class.

Al notes that this began with the opening of The Palazzo in 2007, a tower expansion of the more traditionally themed Venetian Resort. Here the design departed from a literal approach:

In Las Vegas, replica buildings had lost their luster, so [owner Sheldon] Adelson changed the name to the more generic Palazzo. Instead of a classic Venetian style, it was going to be a modern interpretation of Italian Renaissance like the one that was so pervasive in Southern California’s high-end shops and McMansions. “The Palazzo won’t have a recognizable theme like the Venetian.” a Las Vegas Sans spokesman said, “but instead will be an upscale design reminiscent of Bel Air, Rodeo Drive and Beverly Hills.”

The aesthetic broke free, in other words, from the more Disney approach of immersing guests in a recognizable setting of time and place. Renaissance Italy became a more generic “Southern California Luxury” that relies on international brands connoting a particular lifestyle and a certain class of people.

And so it is at CityCenter (a name MGM retired in 2015, preferring its Aria brand). This is supposed to feel like staying the night (or the week) at any other luxury-level site from Shanghai to Paris, Berlin to New York City. The hotels, entertainment, restaurants, and indeed the architecture itself are meant to provide—as MGM had initially promised—the feeling of a “city within a city.”

The integration of DNA from numerous global luxury brands is far from subtle, too. This mall could exist in any one of a dozen cities around the world. But it’s bolder. And in the afternoon I spent walking around, the customers were anything but American (I guessed maybe one in three were from the U.S.). There were many Europeans and, predominantly, visitors from Asia.

Even some old chestnuts have been imported in to provide some pixie dust from other well known destinations with hospitality heritage. The very name Waldorf Astoria provides credibility to those who have visited in New York City (and spent their money there).

I mentioned Shanghai at the start of this post because, architecturally, that’s what I see. And inside the shops and hotel lobbies, that’s the kind of money I saw being spent. I did not see theme park families, the Florida set. I saw older, high rolling couples from other countries. And if there were children in tow, they were fully grown.

What will become of the Disneyland-style family destinations on The Strip? Once again as Al points out, Las Vegas tends to reinvent itself every twenty years or so. Will Paris and The Venetian and The Mirage and Treasure Island and New York New York and Luxor be vastly redesigned? Some are already headed that direction. The Island sunk its pirate show a ways back and is now the “TI” with a focus on sexiness. Luxor has been shedding its Ancient Egyptian roots for years.

Or will some of these be imploded completely? I could see something inexpensive and tame like Excalibur remaining for the kiddies. But for many of these other themed resorts from the 1980s and 1990s, I’m not so sure. Things get even more dicey when you consider that the majority of the casino resorts I just listed are all owned by the very same MGM Resorts.

Las Vegas has learned from Shanghai. Where it will take up studies next?

Viva Las Vegas - Part 2: Thematic Archaeology.

June 19, 2021 by Dave Gottwald

One of my personal guilty pleasures in doing site research is finding the really run down stuff. Destinations that have seen better days; neglected, even partially or totally abandoned. In mega-themed areas like Las Vegas, you can always find some place down on their luck. But I thought was that too easy. So I decided to go further afield.

Totally Terrible

About 25 miles south of the Las Vegas Strip sits Terrible's Hotel & Casino, which opened as the Gold Strike Hotel and Gambling Hall in 1987. In 2014 it was purchased by the Terrible Herbst Oil Company who own those convenience store gas stations you find throughout the Southwest featuring the “Terrible Bandit” mascot. The eponymous renaming took effect four years later.

Terrible’s Hotel & Casino (just outside Primm, Nevada), satellite view. Click for link. Map data: Ⓒ Google.

The site is basically a massive truck stop with ramps and service stations designed to support large semi-trailer rigs. As such, it would appear that most of the casino patrons and overnight guests at Terrible’s are also truck drivers.

The place was in awful shape, and it was cheaply put together to begin with. Which is why I kind of love it so much. I find beauty in the peeling paint and sun bleached stucco.

There was period from the late 80s to the late 90s when thematic design in Las Vegas was just running rampant. As much as I dig this stuff, it really was out of control. This was the era that gave us all the massive kitschy mega-resorts with their own easily-identifiable themes: Excalibur, Luxor, Mirage, Mandalay Bay, Paris, NY NY, etc. So in order to complete, even the more down market establishments made an attempt to slather on some theming. And here at Terrible’s, it’s Vegas’s oldest, its original theme: The Old West.

I ducked inside for just a moment. It was quite dark and the gaming areas were pretty tight quarters, so I didn’t have much leeway to take pictures. Apart from the cute, backlit glass, wood typography signage, there wasn’t much design either. The fun stuff was all outside.

Zooming by on the highway, there’s no way I would have noticed this. In order to foster an illusion of structural diversity, paint lines run all the way to the ground, whether the façade changes or not. Up close this looks super cheap. But from a distance, at speed? I’d have to admit, it’s effective.

What’s most fascinating to me about all these exteriors is that not a single one of them is functional. The lineup of “old timey proprietors” is clearly cribbed from Disney’s Main Street USA, but you can’t open a single door. Like with the paint job above, they’re designed to read from the highway, but crumble upon closer inspection.

And speaking of crumbling. Look at this fabulously distressed lettering. My fellow road tripper David Janssen, Jr. calls this “roached” after a term one of his painting professors used to say.

The above roached letters are actually routed in wood. But most of the primary signage is wood typography—set in fairly authentic faces—rendered in backlit plastic.

Only the actual entrances to the casino areas are real, functioning façades with real doors and windows. The north end features a porte-cochère as that’s where you enter the hotel. Here on the south end it’s just an extra way to get in and gamble for a spell during a rest stop.

I have to wonder if they run these popcorn lights at night. It’s probably expensive, so I doubt it.

Along this south edge of the parking lot you get even more of the “town” that they are trying to suggest.

A red rural barn, crammed right in between the Main Street USA type buildings. I really like the routed type here; it’s a shame it’s painted the same red as the barn and thus only reads if you’re standing right in front of the thing (defeating the purpose of having the structures present well at a distance).

The backlit sign here missing its graphic front suggests that indeed this casino hotel was built with more detail in the late 80s than which have survived to the present day. There is some humorous realism here as well—notice it’s a guns and ammo shop.

Pete’s Dragons?

Terrible’s is actually kind of late to scene around these parts. Another dozen or so miles down Interstate 15, sitting right at the California state line, is Primm. Until the mid-nineties it was simply called “State Line.” But there’s also a Stateline on the southeastern shore of Lake Tahoe, so it was renamed for original developer of the town to avoid confusion. It also sounds better.

Primm, Nevada, satellite view. Click for link. Underlay map data: Ⓒ Google.

Since the late nineties, Primm has been a complex of three casino hotels and an outlet mall. At one time there was both a novelty tram to the north, a train (referred to as a “monorail” but it actually runs on two rails), and a single-car tram to the south that transported people between the casinos and over the interstate highway. The northern highway crossing only lasted the first year or so.

The first casino hotel to open here was Whiskey Pete’s in 1977. Why is it called Whiskey Pete’s? As documented in Weird Las Vegas and Nevada, the local lore is that the owner of the gas station that used to be on this site was a bootlegger during prohibition. “Whiskey Pete” died in 1933 and dedicating a casino hotel to his namesake seems entirely appropriate.

Okay. But why is the place a medieval castle? On this i have no information. But it’s garish, charming, ugly, and totally incongruous. I think the palm trees are a nice touch. And I suppose the cartoon mascot up at the ramparts is Pete. This is the cheesiest kind of theming possible. Even though the place is not super run down like Terrible’s, this is guilty pleasure territory.

Old West 19th century wood typography on a castle. Very miniature golf.

Here is the rather silly looking single car tram that used to travel back and forth over the interstate highway connecting to the Primm Valley Resort to the east. It fell silent sometime in 2016. I’m getting Logan’s Run (1976) vibes. The thing about monorail technology is that it looks super cool and futuristic when you have a long, multi-car train. When it’s just a single little pod somehow it’s incredibly laughable.

Some of the architectural features are suitably grand. You can see to the right where the tram track (white concrete) connects with the casino structure.

I was not able to get many good photos inside, because it was dark and there was nothing noteworthy besides the gaming areas (which you are not permitted to photograph on any casino floor).

The famous Ford Deluxe V-8, shot full of holes in 1934. Wikimedia / Public Domain.

However, Whiskey Pete’s is home to the “Bonnie and Clyde Death Car.” The bullet-ridden Ford Deluxe V-8 was bought by the Primm Valley Resort and Casino in 1988 for ~$250,000.

It was pretty difficult to snap a picture of, sitting most inappropriately and incongruously off to the side of the gaming tables behind plexiglass walls. It’s sort of the intersection between a down market themed casino and the classic Americana roadside attraction, a tradition since the first automobiles.

Primm & Proper

Three casino hotels. Three themes. The other two are over on the opposite side of the highway. Opened in 1990 as Primadonna Resort & Casino, the Primm Valley Resort (as it is known today) is done in a sort of colonial / Victorian motif. It reminded me of a cheap and obnoxious version of a genre which Disney has replicated all over the world (with tons more money of course). I saw one of these original, vintage seaside resorts at Cedar Point in 2017.

Again, we have palm trees.

I spent very little time inside, because again the lighting was not great and there was not much to see beyond the gaming areas. Except up at the ceiling.

Here’s a Disney trick, though not executed very well—forced perspective. There’s a little faux second story with windows, curtains and shutters, and fake balcony railings, all decked out with ridiculous trim and routed wood filigree. Really the only thing of note on this archeology trip.

Slowly Going the Way of the Buffalo

Next door, however, was the mother lode. This was by far my favorite resort in Primm, though it’s in as just as sorry a state as the other two. Obviously a tribute to William Frederick "Buffalo Bill" Cody, this was the last Primm casino hotel to open in 1994, Buffalo Bill’s.

The early to mid-nineties was a peak time for both Rollercoaster Wars and Theming Wars. Everyone was trying to outdo each other with ridiculous extremes, and Buffalo Bills fits right in there. How to grow beyond the core drinking and gambling folks? Every casino company was trying to find new ways to capture the Disney market, the family market. One of the ways was more and more fanciful theming. And the other was to add non-gambling attractions in the form of rides and shows that would be attractive to teens.

The hotel casino opened in May 1994 and its signature attraction followed in August. When Desperado opened it was the tallest roller coaster in the world with a first drop of of 225 feet (209-foot lift hill, maximum speed 80 mph), making it a major draw for Primm. Roller coaster aficionados from all over the world would travel to Buffalo Bill’s just to ride it. Perhaps they would stay a night or too. And drink and gamble some.

Although I didn’t gamble or spend the night, I’ve ridden Desperado twice, once in 2003 and again in 2008. Unfortunately I don’t have any pictures. But it was an intense once for sure. Watch the above POV footage to take a ride yourself (it starts at about 1:23).

As with all coasters in the Roller Coasters War, it didn’t hold its title long. So once all the superfans showed up and rode Desperado once or twice, they moved on to the next big record-setting destination. And even in the longer haul, such a thrilling ride wouldn’t be suited for younger visitors. Buffalo Bill’s had this figured out, so they also opened with a log flume ride in the classic Arrow tradition. Both attractions have outdoor portions and indoor parts that weave through the casino itself, which is exciting for both riders and the gamblers watching them.

Old West Kitsch is everywhere at Buffalo Bill’s, but it’s of a much higher quality than I saw at Terrible’s. Not as slick as DIsney’s Frontierland, not as authentic-feeling as Knott’s Berry Farm’s Ghost Town. Let’s split the difference; somewhat like Cedar Point’s Frontier Trail.

The complex is a lot bigger than you get a sense of from the parking lot and front entrance. The “B Tower” in blue in the upper right of this map is the barn-like structure that’s so prominent when you drive up. Everything else is kind of hidden from immediate view. This is smart on the designers’ part, because there’s a big reveal when you walk into the gaming floor.

Operating Primm Resorts “Monorail” Train, 2009. HowdeeDoodat/Flickr. — Operating Primm Resorts “Monorail” Train, 2009. *HowdeeDoodat/Flickr.*

When I visited in 2008, the main train between Buffalo Bill’s and the Primm Valley Resort was still running; by 2019 it was not. Its four cars were capable holding a maximum of 96 people. Again I put “monorail” in quotes because all these trains and trams actually ran on two rails. I would assume that the resort owners realized that the public probably associates “monorail” with “Disney theme park” so it’s a clever misnomer.

The “monorail” station sits outside above the hotel’s porte-cochère on the second floor. I especially love the Windsor typeface treatment. Maximum cheese.

The train platform is flanked by a little Frontier Town façade which reminded me very much of the original Mine Train Through Nature’s Wonderland at Disneyland (1960–1977).

Although executed cheekily, there are some nicely thought out details here. Observe how when the elevated track leaves the “Old West Town” station at the casino, it’s supported by a wooden railroad trestle which looks and feels authentic to the period.

Only after the track is a good distance from the themed station area do the supports assume the more traditional, modernist-looking (Disney-like) concrete look.

Again, I couldn’t tell what was inside from the street, and this is a wise design move. I had some vague memories from 2003 and 2008, but did not take any pictures on those visits. So I went in pretty cold here. What fun! This is the late 80s to early 90s Extremely Overdone Theming but it’s not half bad.

The architectural details are, again, not Disney but certainly superior to say, a Six Flags environment. The front desk, guest check-in area is made to look like a two story rooming house. There is a mining sluice and water features in the queue area as you wait to speak with someone.

Similarly, the cashier where you cash in your chips is made up to be a bank. The Spanish tile roof and Mission-style stucco are done fairly well. It’s cute. And look at that massive tree trunk to the left! There are several fake trees rising all the way to the pitch black ceiling to make it feel like we are outdoors at night—a common thematic design trick—like the Blue Bayou restaurant at Disneyland.

Something I have observed at other themed casinos on The Strip is that often the design features are used to hide structural supports, as with the false chimneys here on the “Livery Stable Blacksmith” barn.

Here is the “monorail” station from the inside, above the casino exit.

I love the incongruity here, and there is a lot of it throughout the American Southwest. The typeface style (a slab serif) is authentic to the nineteenth century.

But of course the neon is not.

The “Star of the Desert Arena” is themed at its connection to the casino floor areas, but as seen from the parking lot it’s just a massive warehouse. The 6,500-seat indoor hall was built for concerts of the top 40 variety.

There is more detailing here than I expected. Lots of different kinds of buildings. Here the Denny’s chain restaurant location is contained within a brick structure labeled “Feed & Grain.” The inside-for-outside, day-for night is a relaxing shift from the pounding heat outside. One reason people stay inside gambling all day in Nevada is that the air conditioning can’t be beat.

The gaming floors were nicely themed, but of course I’m not allowed to linger around the table games and slots and take photos. So I wandered over to the small food court which is again done up to be part of this “town.” Even the Panda Express is part of the show. From this low angle you can clearly see the filmic and theatrical origins of thematic design; note the stage lighting on the ceiling.

The Buffalo Bill’s people really spent extra on design touches here where they didn’t need to, but the era in which the resort was built was one of this kind of excess.

The two times I had visited prior, I not only rode the signature roller coaster but also the Adventure Canyon Log Flume. In 2003 it was the basic attraction that the hotel had opened with, presumably. By 2008 they had added a “shooting gallery” element to make it more interesting (and perhaps extend its shelf life). There was a light sensor rifled in the log and you used it to shoot at targets throughout the route and rack up a score.

It was sad to see the ride drained of water and basically left to rot.

A tour of the shuttered property, fall 2020.

It was quiet when I visited in the summer of 2019. None of the rides nor trains were running. All of the Primm resorts appeared to be struggling. So when the COVID-19 Global Pandemic hit in the spring months of 2020, they simply got wiped out. Buffalo Bill’s has been completely shuttered with no announced plans to reopen (as of June 2021).

I don’t know what the future holds for Primm and its three resorts. But Buffalo Bill’s in particular is a wonderful snapshot—like an insect trapped in amber—of that time from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s when every casino operator in the region thought that theming would guarantee revenue. Through the lens of the Disney experience, in order to draw families, all you needed to believe was that “if you build it, they will come.” And for a while, it worked. Part of the problem was that the funds invested got the operators some level of thematic design, but without the experiential holism that makes Disney’s projects so superior. The other issue is that there is no media synergy—no intellectual properties or cinematic universes with memorable characters and elaborate backstories—to draw from in.

That might to be the ultimate lesson to take away from places like this; the larger mediascape is the focus, and theming is but one expression of its filmic grammar. It’s the fire keeping the hot air balloon aloft, and without the flame, the whole thing just deflates and comes crashing to the ground.

Continued in Part 3.

Viva Las Vegas - Part 1: Micro-theming and Faux Urbanism.

May 23, 2021 by Dave Gottwald

I haven’t spent time in Las Vegas in a research capacity since 2008. So for a city that is constantly reinventing itself at every turn, there was a lot to take in when I visited again during the first week of July, 2019. I wanted to focus on emerging trends in thematic design, as well as look for any marked changes to The Strip’s most iconic casinos and resorts.

LINQ Promenade, Las Vegas Strip, satellite view. Click for link. Map data: Ⓒ Google.

I stayed at Harrah's on the north end of The Strip. A few blocks walk to the south is a newer “faux urban corridor” which runs down a wide pedestrian alley. As you can see here in the satellite view, this “street” terminates at a massive Ferris wheel called the High Roller which opened in 2014. At 550 feet, it’s currently the tallest such attraction in the world.

To the south (right) is the The Flamingo. The original hotel opened in 1946, and the current structure barely resembles what came before. Third to open on the Strip, it’s now the oldest and the last remaining casino which opened prior to 1950. To the north (left) is The LINQ Hotel + Experience which opened in 2013. This property had for many years been the down-market Imperial Palace (1977)—the only Asian-themed resort on The Strip—and before that the Flamingo Capri (1959).

The corridor in between the two resorts is called The LINQ Promenade. It's sort of Universal CityWalk-like with a greater emphasis on realism. Very Caruso. This side alley off The Strip is certainly not on the level of considered backstory as Disney Springs at Walt Disney World. But the design impulse is still there—to simulate the natural layering which occurs over time in the urban environment.

What is the appeal of this faux urbanism? It's ironic that they want to recreate it here in Las Vegas, a city whose development is its antithesis. False brick buildings and storefronts recall a “timeless but in the past-ness.” Although the promenade is for pedestrian access only, curbs line either side of the storefronts. I almost expected replica pay phones fire hydrants.

Within this faux urban environment is a considerable amount of what I’ve come to call “micro-theming.” Each shop and dining establishment increasingly has its own themes buried within the mega (uber) themes of the resort areas themselves. What I used to call an “all you can eat thematic buffet” that arose during the 1980s placed variety primarily at the resort level. If you wanted to sample a new theme, you walked on.

There seems to be more micro-theming in Las Vegas than I remember in 2008. All the mega-themed resports, the Luxors and Excaliburs and New York New Yorks and Bellagios and Venetians, seem to be a bit passé. The big ones are still here, lively as ever, but they’re also full of a diversity of micro themes.

Again, the layering here isn’t exactly Disney-level. But the designers made an effort to establish a more natural urban sense of place over time. Some buildings are made to look older than their current tenants.

Not that most folks would notice but there appears to be little micro histories built into most structures. For example a sports bar featuring sexy school girls looks like it has been installed into an early 20th century bank.

All of this is mixed with more contemporary retail and dining design, like you might find anywhere across the Sun Belt. Bright and open. Employing vernacular architectural styles, but without any dressing down or aging. “Old built as new” as you might find anywhere from Santa Barbara to Santa Fe.

The plantings in particular suggest nearby Southern California.

Southeastern small town folkiness is also thrown into the mix, though the buildings themselves are all brick and suggest larger cities in the North.

I call this sort of thing “Cracker Barrel Pastiche.” It’s the sort of establishment where sweet tea cocktails are served in mason jars and peanut shells cover the wood plank floors.

In a nod to classic, Rat Pack-era Vegas, there is neon signage throughout. This little bit in the window adds some Nashville Honky-tonk flavor.

But some of the other marquees are much more elaborate and smack of a mid-century supper club.

One thing the faux urban approach provides to contemporary brands is the opportunity to place themselves in an alternate history of sorts, in a grand imagined past. In-N-Out Hamburgers was founded in 1948, but it was a simple roadside drive-thru stand. Here the fast food restaurant has been reimagined as a Hollywood Golden Era movie house.

Everything continues to be nested like Russian dolls—themes inside themes inside even more themes.

If you want to change immersion channels you just walk into a different restaurant or bar instead of a new hotel property. Perhaps the mega-resort approach is truly becoming a thing of the past.

For those who are looking to notice it, the incongruities in these types of environments can be overwhelming. I'm beginning to wonder if the overall audacity of it all is the appeal. I still see visitors of all stripes who are saying to themselves “wow they actually did this” whatever “this” is.

In this case, a celebrity chef fish ‘n’ chips restaurant’s entrance is a pair of oversized, cartoonish London telephone boxes.

Excess in this context doesn't just mean a lot. It also means ridiculous as in “this doesn't make sense to me.” I look at a design decision and laugh and think this is a mistake but maybe it's not a mistake. The contradiction is the point. It's the appeal.

In the end, it’s all just the wrapping paper on the real package: getting you inside the casinos to gamble.

The most meta moment I had during my Las Vegas stay was certainly this souvenir shop. The classic “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” sign designed by Betty Willis in 1959 can be found all over town, from the replica photo-op at the airport to t-shirts and coffee mugs. In 2005, even the Nevada license plate issued to commemorate the Las Vegas centennial featured the sign.

Although Young Electric Sign Company (YESCO) has owned the sign since their purchase of its fabrication in the early 1960s, they lease the sign to the county and the design itself has never been trademarked (rumor is that Willis wished it to be her gift to the city and remain freely in the public domain).

Seeing it here, tucked into this promenade of faux urbanist micro-theming and adapted into a storefront fin was almost a bridge too far.

Continued in Part 2.

Monument (to Cinema) Valley.

November 09, 2020 by Dave Gottwald

I mentioned a few posts back that I would elaborate on why Monument Valley Tribal Park is such a special place for me and why I’ve longed to visit the site since I was probably nine or ten years old.

Monument Valley, The Mittens, satellite view. Click for link. Map data: Ⓒ Google.

Yes indeed I was drawn to the valley partly because its contours are the basis for three out of four Big Thunder Mountain attractions Disney Parks around the world.

That the “Mittens” (West and East Mitten Buttes) of Monument Valley are so recognizable around the world is due to the Western genre of cinema.

The Westerns of John Ford

For most Americans, Monument Valley became cemented in the public imagination due to the films of one man, famed director John Ford (1894–1973). Stagecoach (1939), My Darling Clementine (1946), Fort Apache (1948). and most notably The Searchers (1956) all feature the vistas and Mittens of the valley as the primary canvas for their narratives. Ford shot a total of ten films here, and many other directors have followed in his stead.

Monument Valley, John Ford Point, satellite view. Click for link. Map data: Ⓒ Google.

When Ford first saw Monument Valley, he knew it was something special. And moreover, something inherently cinematic about the look of the place. Settings on film have to read for an audience immediately, communicating through visual literacy. Hyperbolic, iconic, and unmistakable.

As the story goes, John Ford’s discovery and popularization of the valley is credited to Harry Goulding, provisioner and trader to the local Navajo population. After visiting the region with a friend in 1921, two years later Golding and his wife claimed 640 acres and began raising sheep and trading with nearby Native Americans. Towards the end of the 1920s they established their Monument Valley Trading Post which later evolved into a lodge. “Goulding’s Monument Valley” still does business today.

According to the Goulding’s organization, it was the Great Depression which brought Harry and John together:

So Harry and Mike set out on a journey to Hollywood, California with their last $60. By luck and perseverance, Harry met the famous director John Ford. When Ford saw Harry’s photos of Monument Valley, he knew it was the perfect location for his next movie. The Gouldings received an advanced payment, and in a few days, John Ford and his crew began filming Stagecoach starring John Wayne.

The valley’s Hollywood fame goes well beyond Ford however. There’s an entire wikipedia page devoted to films shot on location here.

However, most of them are not the reason I’m so personally attached to Monument Valley…

Airwolf, 1984–1986 series. All screen caps are from my Blu Ray collection. — *Airwolf*, 1984–1986 series. All screen caps are from my Blu Ray collection.

Airwolf and the Lady’s Lair

That honor goes to Airwolf, an action-adventure series which ran from January 1984 (the two-hour pilot movie debuted directly following the Super Bowl that year) to the spring of 1986 on CBS. A syndicated fourth season, shot in Canada, ran on the USA Network basic cable channel with a completely different cast (but the same aerial stock footage) until August 1987, but let’s try and forget that completely.

Airwolf starred Jan-Michael Vincent as Stringfellow Hawke, a loner Vietnam veteran and test pilot who steals a top secret, supersonic stealth helicopter “Airwolf” back from Gaddafi (Libya being one of the more popular bad guys of the Reagan era). Helping him is sidekick Dominic Santini (Ernest Borgnine). Hawke brokers with his intelligence community contact Archangel (Alex Cord) that he won’t return Airwolf unless the government can find his brother who is MIA in Southeast Asia. Thus the premise is typical of other such competing shows like Knight Rider and The A-Team; Hawke and Santini use the helicopter to go on missions which defy traditional intervention as “outsiders.”

As I loved the show so dearly as a child—watching it after it was canceled, for years, first on the USA Network and then KTLA 5—I could on and on, but I’ll spare you and just provide a link to the wiki.

Typical of other “hardware” series of the 1980s, the star of the show was really the helicopter itself, which they affectionately call “The Lady.” Hawke refuses to return Airwolf to the government agency which developed it, so he needs to hide it somewhere. This became a running trope during the first season of the show, that certain government operatives are always on Hawke’s heels but can’t find the chopper.

Airwolf shooting locations in Monument Valley. Underlay map data: Ⓒ Google. — *Airwolf* shooting locations in Monument Valley. Underlay map data: Ⓒ Google.

By the magic of location shooting, where he secreted away The Lady was Monument Valley. In the show this hiding place, a sort of cave with a hole in the top for the helicopter to enter and exit, was known as “The Lair.” As you can see in the map above, a composite of two different mesas were filmed for the “fly-in” and “walk-in” views for this location.

Because it was obviously quite expensive to fly the star helicopter (a modified Bell 222) and a whole second unit crew out on location, they only went twice: early December 1983 and then again in July 1984.

In the pilot episode “Shadow of the Hawke,” Dominic flies Stringfellow out to what he thinks will be a good hiding place. “This is it. Valley of the Gods. Even the Indians don’t come up here,” Ernest Borgnine says, establishing its remoteness. The name he gives is confusing, though, because there is a real Valley of the Gods with similar scenery just across the border in Utah.

The script had to explain the unexpected storm which befell the second unit photography. Thus Dominic notes that “there’s always a little snow up here, even in the summer” allowing for the use of the footage year-round. They then approach Thunderbird Mesa and attempt to fly into “The Lair.”

When Airwolf was depicted as leaving “The Lair” it was shown from this angle. In reality there is no cave at the bottom which a helicopter (or today, I suppose, a drone) could hover into and land.

Watching this stock footage over and over on series was fascinating to me as a child, because a.) snow on Southwestern-type rock formations looks very cool and b.) I was young enough to think that it might be movie magic that it was even snowing in the desert.

Southwestern snow, everywhere. It all looked so strange, particularly when I watch reruns of Airwolf it was invariably during the summer months. Where was this magical place? I didn’t know what Monument Valley was at that age. It seemed sort of unreal. It looked kind of like the Grand Canyon, and I had seen pictures of that. Maybe it was nearby?

Comically, this wintertime footage of the valley was also used whenever Airwolf went flying off to a cold locale—repeatedly violating the borders of the U.S.S.R.—and as it was a hastily edited show which was heavily reliant on stock footage, we got things like what you see above from that initial second unit shoot, which could be tundra anywhere I suppose.

But while flying through “Russia” or “Alaska” you’d suddenly get a shot like this. Of course I didn’t realize how cheesy this is until a got a little older.

In July 1984 the show’s second unit returned to shoot more footage of the Airwolf Bell 222 before the start of the 84-85 season. This time the valley appropriately scanned as “desert.” The motion blur as seen above is because Airwolf is supposed to be supersonic, even though it’s impossible for helicopters to fly faster than sound (due to something in physics called “flow separation”). So they sped up the footage instead.

In the show’s second and third seasons, this “natural” and “expected” summertime footage was used exclusively, and the snowy Monument Valley featured in that first short episode run (Airwolf had been a midseason replacement) was never seen again.

So much for there always being a little snow “even in the summer.”

The other thing about Airwolf’s hiding spot is that Hawke and company are always a short flight or drive away, despite being headquartered in Southern California. Often they appear to retrieve the helicopter within minutes of needing it. In one first season episode, the “Valley of the Gods” was shown to be found on a “Las Vegas sectional map” but still, in Dom’s Bell JetRanger, that’s quite a jaunt.

The entire three or four hours I spent at Monument Valley, there was only one album in the CD player of my truck: the wonderful Airwolf Extended Themes soundtrack (2014) produced by Mark J. Cairns. This allowed me to live out my childhood memories of lying on the floor of the family den, transfixed by this supersonic stealth helicopter and its secret hiding place, “The Lair” in the “Valley of the Gods.”

Back to the Future III, 1990 film. All screen caps are from my DVD. — *Back to the Future III,* 1990 film. All screen caps are from my DVD.

Where You’re Going There Are No Roads

Yet there’s still one more reason I was delighted to finally make it to Monument Valley after all this time.

The year after Airwolf debuted, Back to the Future (1985) appeared in theaters, and my childhood brain was forever changed. The eventual trilogy would become one of my very favorites. While my schoolmates were playing Star Wars and Han Solo during recess, I was dreaming of my own Delorean time machine and imagining travelling back in time at 88 miles per hour.

Back to the Future III (1990) is the final installment. I won’t get into to all the details, but suffice it to say, present-day (1985) Doc Brown is trapped one hundred years ago in the Old West. 1955 Doc has to help 1985 Marty McFly go back to rescue his future self and prevent him from being murdered.

What’s so appropriate—and for my purposes, revelatory—is the set piece director Robert Zemeckis and crew came up with for the time travel sequence back to 1885. Zemeckis not only sought Monument Valley for the location shoot (which is somehow only a short drive for Doc from Hill Valley, California; then again on Airwolf they made it out from Van Nuys on a weekly basis) but decided that Marty depart from a midcentury drive-in movie theater.

Note the painted mural of charging Indians below the screen. Marty says to Doc that if he drives towards the screen he’s “going to crash into those Indians.” Doc reminds him that he’s “not thinking fourth dimensionally” and that once he travels back in time “those Indians won’t even be there.”

The joke is that as Marty reaches the drive-in screen, accelerating to 88 mph, he’s instantly transported back to 1885 and what was a painting becomes real. The Indians, being chased by a brigade of the U.S. Calvary, are charging straight towards him in the Delorean.

Above is the whole clip so you can see how clever the shot is.

There are a couple of things going on here. First, in a very real sense, the movie screen is a kind of time machine, transporting us to whatever setting the film requires. The audience enters the image to experience a movie, just as Marty penetrates the drive-in screen and “smashes” into the past.

Second, Monument Valley represents “The Western” as a film genre. Marty isn’t actually travelling to the real past, rather, he’s travelling to the Old West as it is represented in the movies. I’m pretty sure Zemeckis only intended the location to be a loving tribute to all the John Ford Westerns shot here which he probably watched as a kid. But taken critically, it’s actually a profound statement. Monument Valley = the Western genre, and Marty driving through the movie screen = literally entering that genre.

Later in the film, Doc and Marty attempt to get the Delorean up to 88 mph using six horses to pull it. Again, this is a clever tribute to the first feature Ford shot here (at Goulding’s suggestion), the John Wayne classic, Stagecoach.

So why all this about Airwolf and Back to the Future III…what does this have to do with theming? Well, my emotional connection to this landscape only exists cinematically. Monument Valley is a visual feast in its own right, as magnificent as the Grand Canyon or any number of other National Parks in the region. But if not for film and television, it wouldn’t hold such powerful, potent nostalgia for me.

I’m not ashamed to admit that I wanted to drive through the valley like Marty McFly did before me. I wanted to imagine flying through the landscape in Airwolf (and listening to the show’s soundtrack allowed me to do just that). And why should I be? This is very common phenomenon. There are entire tourism sectors based solely in televisuals, from visiting “James Bond Island” in Thailand to staying the night in a “Hobbit Hole” in New Zealand.

As my colleague Gregory Turner-Rahman and I argue in our award-winning article, “The End of Architecture: Theme Parks, Video Games, and the Built Environment in Cinematic Mode,” the movies colonize our experiences of the physical and virtual world, and alter our perceptions and expectations of spaces. My satisfying response to Monument Valley is just one more example.