Photo Journal/ Photo Challenge: D is for Downtown Vegas

It’s Tuesday once again! Time to post for Frizztext’s A-Z Photo Challenge. Letter this week is D and my theme is Downtown Vegas. Since we stayed for a little over two weeks in Las Vegas, we had time to really visit the out-of-the-way places. We found out from locals that Downtown used to be the Old Strip. When we were there, the whole vibe of the place felt like an unused memory, a fragment of a lost thought, a discarded beer bottle, with its faded neon-light charm – frozen in time and space – surreal. Or a 90 year old grandma in bright red lipstick, a purple mohawk – wearing six-inch stiletto heels and fishnet stockings – ancient but still rockin’ and rollin’. Despite this old-school feel, I actually liked it more than the Strip. It has more character, less glittery, with a ghost-town feel to it – very surreal. Add the fact that I like the outskirts, those in the fringes, the boundaries of what used to be, and this place is exactly just that.

Downtown Vegas

“The Strip was still lit by a million neon lights, though the crowds on the sidewalk had greatly decreased by this hour.  Still, Bosch was awed by the spectacle of light.  In every imaginable color and configuration, it was a megawatt funnel of enticement to greed that burned twenty-four hours a day.  Bosch felt the same attraction that all the other grinders felt tug at them.  Las Vegas was like one of the hookers on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood.  Even happily married men at least glanced their way, if only for a second, just to get an idea what was out there, maybe give them something to think about.  Las Vegas was like that.  There was a visceral attraction here.  The bold promise of money and sex.  But the first was a broken promise, a mirage, and the second was fraught with danger, expense, physical and mental risk.  It was where the real gambling took place in this town.” 

~ Michael Connelly, Trunk Music

“Las Vegas suggests that the thirst for places, for cities and gardens and wilderness, is unslaked, that people will still seek out the experience of wandering about in the open air to examine the architecture, the spectacles, and the stuff for sale, will still hanker after surprises and strangers. That the city as a whole is one of the most pedestrian-unfriendly places in the world suggests something of the problems to be faced, but that its attraction is a pedestrian oasis suggests the possibility of recovering the spaces in which walking is viable.” 

~ Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

“Life is not always a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well.” 

~ Jack London

“You never know beforehand what people are capable of, you have to wait, give it time, it’s time that rules, time is our gambling partner on the other side of the table and it holds all the cards of the deck in its hand, we have to guess the winning cards of life, our lives.”  ~ José Saramago, Blindness

“There is a lure in power. It can get into a man’s blood just as gambling and lust for money have been known to do.”  

~ Harry S. Truman

“What hath night to do with sleep?” 

― John Milton, Paradise Lost

How about you, dear friends, what is your D photo for this week? Leave a link in the Comments section and I’d be sure to visit your post.