Strip Search

Old signs languish in the boneyard of the Neon Museum, awaiting restoration. (Neil Emmerson)

One thing I couldn't get over, as I drove around, was how much the style of the place had changed, how different the new construction looked from the Las Vegas I had expected, the iconic signs, the glittering hotels I had seen in movies. In their places were these galactic complexes, each a fully realized little city revolving around a particular theme: Paris, New York, Arabia, outer space, Coca-Cola. About the only thing the new Las Vegas hadn't gotten around to imitating was the old Las Vegas. The old Las Vegas seemed to have disappeared entirely.

The day after Pogo's, I was driving past a fenced lot on Las Vegas Boulevard, north of town, when I noticed a sliver of painted metal above the chain link. The lot is across the street from the Las Vegas Cultural Center, a multipurpose facility on what the city calls its "cultural corridor," and when I poked my head in and began looking around I was directed to the office of a woman named Melanie Coffee. Coffee is the curator of the Neon Museum, a project that collects signs from doomed hotels and other local buildings. Hanging on one wall in her office is a large framed blueprint of the original neon sign for the Stardust Hotel, the one with the Jetsons-era font and the four-pointed stars.

The fenced lot I had seen was the boneyard, where the old signs languish until they can be preserved and displayed, a project for which Coffee is fund-raising. Until then, tours of the lot can be made by appointment, for a modest fee. Coffee used to work in the music business in L.A., and she has the mellow artsiness of a ex-punk rocker. "I have a tour at 3," she said, considering. "But if you wanted, I could take you over there for a quick look."

The entrance to the lot was on a side street, across from a house that Coffee said was holding a month-long eviction sale, and whose front yard was littered with armchairs and lawnmower parts. She worked on the padlock, and after a minute swung open the gate with a flourish. In front of us stood a giant high-heeled shoe, painted silver and studded with light bulbs, which had been rescued from the roof of the Silver Slipper on its demolition day in 1988.

I had expected a few relics, prostrate in the dust. But the boneyard was a crowded metropolis of signs and artifacts. They towered over us, like a scene from "Jason and the Argonauts": the W from the old Showboat Hotel, two stories tall; the Coin King, a jolly monarch running his hands through a shower of neon pennies, from the defunct slots establishment the Coin Palace; a giant, three-dimensional crown from the Royal Nevada Hotel; a Paul-Bunyan-size pool player, constructed in the round from sheet metal, from the roof of the old Doc and Eddy's pool hall; the ornate corner section, called a bullnose, of the original Golden Nugget building.

Dan Romano, the Neon Museum's facilities manager, said that neon began to be widely used in Las Vegas in the '30s and '40s, when people began traveling into town by car, and could see the signs from a long way off. Neon fell out of favor in the late '80s, when Las Vegas's tourism board ushered in an era of "family entertainment," and all the big new hotels started using LED screens and what Romano called "coved" neon, a hidden light source that casts a tasteful glow.

What the signs lacked in dignity, they made up for in personality. Their builders, carried away with the power to transform the darkness, had constructed, in effect, an entire fantasy city over the real one, and the distinctive vernacular of points and lines that they created is still immediate and dramatic. Once, Coffee said, an old signmaker took a tour of the lot, inspecting the craftsmanship on the signs, most of which were made by hand. She pointed out footholds across the broad face of the W for the people who had to climb up to replace burned-out bulbs. She showed me how the angles of the pool player's face had been created from dozens of flat scraps welded together.

In a far corner of the lot we found a set of the original letters from Caesars Palace, faded blue and with an exaggerated "A-Funny-Thing-Happened-on-the-Way-to-the-Forum" flair to the font. It was an odd feeling to see them lying there in the sun. I wondered if I'd seen them printed on an ashtray of my grandfather's or in one of his old photographs. They looked exactly the way I'd pictured them.

My last night in Las Vegas I decided to visit Caesars Palace, to try to find the restaurant where my grandfather had seen Sinatra. At 10 o'clock on a weekend night, the Strip was gridlocked. People hung out of their sunroofs, their woofers grumbling out chest-compression bass. As I circled the block, I saw the new, improved Stardust sign, its blocky, sans-serif logo shimmering in the night sky. It took me an hour and a half to drive a mile down the Strip to Caesars, and when I got to valet parking, it was full.

I stuck my head out the window -- at the last minute I had put on the blond wig from Serge's -- and hollered at the valet, who was handing over a Mercedes SUV. "Are you guys really full?" I said, hoping the wig was on straight. He blinked at me, and then gave me a covert "over here" waggle of his fingers. "I'll get you in," he said.

Caesar's Palace today is a sprawling complex of Roman-themed attractions: the new showroom called the Colosseum; the Forum Shops; the Atlantis Aquarium; shows in which statues "come to life" and tell stories. It seems to have grown up organically around the original hotel; from inside, the buildings extend in all directions, and it is hard to get one's bearings. The casino and the shops were so packed I had trouble pushing my way through. Finally reaching the front desk, I asked a kid who looked about 19 where the old showroom was. He looked blank. "I have no idea what you're talking about," he said. "There's a bar that way" -- he pointed through a gantlet of video screens -- "but there's no showroom over there."

The bar seemed right -- it overlooked a pool, which my grandfather had mentioned -- but it was so small and fancy I hesitated to go in. Across the way there was a half-enclosed room whose door was flanked by two nude bronze statues holding ostrich-feather fans. This, it turned out, was the high-rollers' room, and I made a quick circuit through the icy air conditioning, drawing unfriendly stares from the closely shaven men in dark suits who stood watch at the back of the room.

Finally I spotted, in a roped-off area behind the craps tables, a man in a uniform who looked a little younger than my grandfather, standing by himself. I was looking for a certain restaurant, I said, and then I told him my grandfather's story. He listened, nodding. "That's probably the restaurant," he said, pointing at the bar, "or one of those behind us." Then he pointed to the high-rollers' room. "That's the old showroom," he said. "Frank Sinatra played right over there." He grinned a little at the memory, and rocked back on his heels.

I looked around. The room seemed different, now that he mentioned it, from the rest of the place. It wasn't trying as hard. The ceilings were lower and the lighting softer. People stood around genteelly, cocktails in hand. At the entrance to the old showroom, a woman was getting her picture taken with a bronze nude. It seemed remarkable that the room was there at all, more or less intact, a dim, rarified chamber at the center of the high-tech clamor.

I tried to imagine my grandfather here, dressed to the nines, cigar in hand, breezing through the crowd with my grandmother on one arm. It wasn't hard, actually. Except for at the high-rollers' tables, there was a pervasive joie de vivre in the place. I wandered back through the street of luxury shops called the Appian Way, where people strolled along a walkway made to look like a winding cobblestone street, under a vaulted ceiling painted with fluffy clouds and glowing (I noticed) from lights hidden in an alcove underneath. Almost to my dismay, the combined effect of the imported marble and the cove lighting and the fake Roman statues was a dawning sense of enchantment. I wasn't just amused by the scene. I was captivated by it. It was absurd and contrived, and thoroughly delightful.

On my way out I passed a young couple standing beside a marble column. "That's the most amazing thing I've ever seen," the guy said to his companion, gazing at the ceiling. "Isn't it?" she said, and glanced at me. We smiled ridiculously at one another. I caught a glimpse of us in a window behind them: three people standing in front of a ritzy clothing store, one of us in an unnaturally blond wig that was slipping a little over her eyes, on a fake ancient Roman highway on a fake afternoon in the middle of the night in Nevada. We looked like we were having the time of our lives.

Lauren Wilcox last wrote for the Magazine about a dude ranch in New Mexico. She will be fielding questions and comments about this article Monday at 1 p.m. at washingtonpost.com/liveonline.