Chicago Sun-Times: SIN-TENNIAL

A neon oasis in the desert--this is Las Vegas. In its own surreal way, it can soothe, nourish and reinvigorate the spirit. Whatever ails you floats away. The seemingly drab, everyday life back home evaporates faster than a stack of chips at the roulette wheel.

Judy Garland once sang, "Forget your troubles, come on get happy." Everybody's happy when they arrive in this town.

On the other hand, the late comedian Alan King once said that "Las Vegas turns women into men and men into idiots." And taking a good look at the behavior of the tourists around here, he has a point.

They morph into beings even their families back home wouldn't recognize. There are no windows or clocks in Las Vegas casinos. Day turns into night turns into day, and people are parted from their money quite legally.

Longing created this place, someone else once said. Indeed.

Las Vegas celebrates its 100th birthday May 15 -- 100 years of giving people whatever they long for: instant riches, naughty romances, quick weddings, unparalleled entertainment, incomparable dining and shopping, sun and fun in the middle of the driest spot in America. And for all its rags and riches, for all its broken promises and fallen heroes, Las Vegas has constantly reinvented itself, saved itself from extinction. Nowhere has the wrecking ball landed more powerful blows than in Las Vegas, where the old bastions of a bygone era constantly make way for sparkling new oases of pleasure.

From its primitive beginnings as a dusty, dirt-road spot on the map along the highway to Los Angeles, Las Vegas (it comes from the Spanish term meaning "the Meadows" because of artesian underground springs that once gave birth to the area's ancient lush green fields) spent much of its subsequent youth as a grown-ups' fantasy playground. The "anything goes" attitude became the town's mantra as much of what was considered illegal or morally reprehensible elsewhere, was suddenly all the rage in this glistening speck in the desert. And the illegality of it all went right to the city's core, which for nearly 20 years, between the 1940s and the 1960s, meant mob rule. Casinos in the desert made mob bosses in the East extremely rich. Credit mobster Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel for much of their fortunes. His vision for the city's untapped wealth included resorts, namely the Flamingo Hotel, the first full-out luxury hotel on the Strip. It also made him a marked man. Pleasure palaces had names like the Sahara, the Thunderbird, the Desert Inn, the Riviera, the Dunes, the Sands -- creating illusions of grandeur and making Midases out of mobsters.

But it wasn't just the gambling that fueled the fire. Some of the world's biggest stars became even bigger giants of the business on the Las Vegas showroom stages owned by crime bosses.

"I didn't know better, in retrospect," said Wayne Newton, one of the few headlining entertainers from the golden era of Las Vegas who still performs nightly, in a theater that bears his name at the Stardust Hotel. "I didn't know that I was working for 'the boys' back then. I was 15 when I first came out here and I couldn't even walk through the casinos. To me, the casino boss would shake my hand, tell me how many shows to do a week, and that was it. It was a different time. It was very personal in a way because it was all done by handshakes. There were no contracts and that was OK with everybody. It wasn't until I started working for Mr. [Howard] Hughes and the whole corporate takeover of the city that I realized who I had been working for before that."

"It IS a very different kind of town today," said singer Paul Anka, who has spent much of his 48-year career headlining the Strip casinos. "I started there when the mob ran the town, and they were great hosts if you were an entertainer at one of their hotels. They really looked after you. It was all much more personal. I saw the town in its very early days, when it was fun, stylish, a lot more personal. Everybody got dressed up to go to a casinos. High rollers were a different class of high roller. Today it's a very different crowd. The audience looks like it could be anywhere U.S.A. because nobody gets dressed up anymore. It's no longer the 'let's go out on the town tonight' mentality. People just wander from casino to casino. Corporations have made it very impersonal. Was it better back then? The best way to put it would be to simply say it was different."

Hughes came to Las Vegas in 1966, planning to stay for 10 days. He set up shop on the 9th floor of the Desert Inn, which afforded him glorious views of the city below and the solitude of the desert beyond. The billionaire, rapidly descending into life as a mad recluse, decided he wanted to stay. When threatened with eviction, Hughes did the only thing he could -- he bought the Desert Inn. Hughes officially had brought corporate America to the desert. The mob was phased out as the billionaire recluse bought up one hotel property after another including the Sands, the New Frontier, the Landmark, the Silver Slipper. He even bought the airport. Suddenly, casinos were going legitimate. Decisions were made in boardrooms, not back rooms.

By the mid 1970s, Hughes was dead, and so was the "golden age" of Las Vegas. Gone were the dress codes for the lounges and showrooms. It was the era of the all-you-can-eat buffet, the 99-cent shrimp cocktail, the $5.95 prime rib and lobster dinner, the $19-per-night hotel room. On the East Coast, Atlantic City legalized gambling, and for the first time in its history, Las Vegas was losing steam. For a while, with the opening of billionaire Kirk Kerkorian's luxurious MGM Grand in 1973, Las Vegas seemed to be turning the corner in terms of growth and luxury. That excitement would be short-lived as the hotel was engulfed by a fire in 1980, killing 85 people.

Enter a new era, that of the mega-resort, trumpeted by Caesars Palace in 1969 and perfected in 1989 when Steve Wynn, already a fixture on the downtown Las Vegas scene with the Golden Nugget, came uptown in a big way with the opening of his $618 million, 3,000- room Mirage Hotel and Casino, a genuine oasis in the desert unlike anything the town or the world had ever seen. It was the beginning of the new Las Vegas.

"There hadn't been any new casino opening since 1973," said Robert Baldwin, president and CEO of Mirage Resorts Inc., a wholly- owned subsidiary of MGM-Mirage Inc., which owns five major casino resorts in town, including the Mirage.

"When Steve came in with the Mirage, no one had ever spent that kind of money on one property before. But we as a company always believed in the Mirage. It had the best location on the Strip, it had a great neighbor next door with Caesars. And we believed from the start that the Las Vegas tourist wanted something spectacular in the desert."

So successful was the Mirage, (it made $200 million its first year) that Wynn opened its sister resort, Treasure Island, in 1993 right next door. Five years later, he would implode the legendary Dunes Hotel to erect the town's most gorgeous and lavish resort, the $1.6 billion Bellagio. Across town, Kerkorian re-emerged with a new $1 billion, 112-acre MGM Grand Hotel & Theme Park featuring a 5,000- room hotel, making it the largest hotel property in the world. Las Vegas was back. Hotels that were once independently owned were now part of huge corporate conglomerates with plenty of money to spend.

Soon afterward, luxuriously themed resorts such as the Venetian Hotel, the Paris Las Vegas, the new Aladdin, New York New York, the Monte Carlo, Mandalay Bay and the Stratosphere opened their multimillion-dollar doors to eager gamblers. But it wasn't just the gambling that would now attract the tourists and their dollars. Shopping, dining and entertainment exploded in a way that no one could have ever imagined. Prada, Gucci, Fendi, Escada, Tiffany, Armani were now profitably ensconced in the desert. The world's greatest chefs served their wildest dreams on silver platters by hotels longing to feed the high-end shoppers with celebrity fare. While more than 37 million tourists made their way through Las Vegas in 2004, gaming accounted for only 42 percent of revenues on the Strip against 58 percent for nongaming ventures such as entertainment, dining and retail.

"Entertainment is most certainly a huge part of what makes drives Las Vegas today," Baldwin said. "Siegfried & Roy ushered in a whole new style of entertainment when they opened at the Mirage. Their show widened the entire market of entertainment. We built them a $40 million theater for their show, and lots of people thought we were nuts. But it was a partnership that worked, and everyone who thought we were crazy was suddenly scrambling to build their own theaters, get their own distinctive headliner."

For the old-style headliners, the lavish production show meant the end of the lounge circuit, the end of many of the rooms that were once home to everyone from Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin to Lena Horne, Nat King Cole and Louis Prima. While a headliner's name still would be visible on a resort's marquee, it seemed somewhat secondary to the resident multimillion-dollar production show. Nowhere is that more evident than in the four spectacular productions by the Montreal-based Cirque du Soleil, which will soon sprout a fifth permanent production in Las Vegas.

"We planted a flower in the desert 12 years ago with 'Mystere' at Treasure Island," said Daniel LaMarre, CEO of Cirque du Soleil. "Now it has flourished, and we are very proud of that. This is the entertainment capital of the world. New York or London can no longer claim that title. Each of our shows is vastly different from the other. People who come here for a three-night stay may take in two of them because they are so unique and so diverse."

If Cirque changed the game in terms of mega-production shows, credit Celine Dion with turning the world of headliner on its ear. In 2001, Dion opened the biggest showcase in Las Vegas history for a single headlining performer. While Cirque productions have no "star" at their core, Dion's "A New Day" is all about star power. The 90-minute extravaganza, created by former Cirque guru Franco Dragone, combines Dion's music with a Cirque-like production. The massive 4,100-seat, $95-million Colosseum at Caesars Palace was built specifically with Dion in mind. Only Elvis, some 30 years earlier, could claim a similar "star" show, albeit on a much smaller scale.

"We wanted a show where people would come to see her in concert, yet it would be very different from a concert experience," said Rene Angelil, Dion's husband and manager. "It would mean her fans would have to come here to see her, in a theater built with her in mind, in a show built around her."

"At this point in my career, for me, it was no risk," Dion said. "I had this incredible opportunity and this is the only city in the world where we felt it could work. There were many, many people who stood to lose a lot if this concept did not work. But this is the best show of my career, in a spectacular production, in something that was very different in this city in terms of a music show. This is a privilege for me."

As for the future, Las Vegas is the only city in America where the construction cranes operate 24/7. Luxury high-rises with multimillion-dollar penthouses increasingly dot the landscape; it is the fastest-growing city in America, and even Donald Trump has announced plans for a Trump Las Vegas. MGM-Mirage Inc. is embarking on the biggest mixed-use development in U.S. history with the construction of Project City Center, a combination of boutique hotels, a shopping district, restaurants, a 4,000-room hotel/casino and eight 40-story private residence towers located on 66 acres between the Bellagio and the Monte Carlo on the west side of the Strip.

"In terms of development projects, this one is truly unprecedented," Baldwin said. "It's 18 million square feet of space for people who want a whole new Las Vegas experience. People who want to come to Las Vegas and not necessarily step foot inside a traditional casino property." Completion date for the project is scheduled for 2010.

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At the end of the day, is Las Vegas overrated? Is it just too hip, too cool, too exciting for its own good? Is it pricing the average tourist out of the market?

"Overrated? No way," Anka said. "If you want to see the most expensive shows in the world, they're here. If you want a great hotel room at a price you can't get anywhere else, it's here. If you want to enjoy some of the best restaurants in the world, they're all here. If you want to shop at the best stores in the world, they're all here. [chuckling]. Whatever you want, it's here."

Longing did create this oasis.

Yes, indeed.