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The Other Las Vegas

Las Vegas, New Mexico: "Far from the glad clamor and merry chaos of the one in Nevada."

By Larry Tritten

Found in: | Outside | Our Towns | Where to Go |

I've never been to Las Vegas, and you probably haven't either.

The Las Vegas I haven't been to is in Nevada, and the one I have been to but you probably haven't is in New Mexico. The two have about as much in common as Disneyworld and Deadwood, S.D., which is to say that one is a high-tech and futuristic fantasyland and the other is a place where the natural world and Western history companionably co-exist.

Las Vegas means "the meadows," but you won't find any meadows in Las Vegas, Nev., where the town is defined by its electrochemical bouquet of incandescent colored lights, its towering, revolving and animated signs. I have nothing against such extravagant tableaux, but herein will make a case for what the other Las Vegas offers far from the glad clamor and merry chaos of the one in Nevada.

I flew over Las Vegas to get to Las Vegas. I looked at the former somewhat wistfully as it faded like a mirage below the plane, thinking about all the noise and laughter down there, circuses of gaudy fun in packed casinos, shows to shame the Ziegfeld Follies, Lucullan buffets, hotels that location scouts might recommend for use in movies like "Star Wars." I'd been there vicariously countless times, of course. From a mostly forgotten movie musical titled "Meet Me in Las Vegas," the original "Ocean's Eleven," and "Viva Las Vegas" through a spectrum of more recent movies (Nicolas Cage in no less than three!) memory serves up an extensive montage of scenes set in gambling casinos.

Yet the other Las Vegas, I would learn to my surprise, also has been the site of much movie action, mostly Westerns and these dating back to some of Tom Mix's earliest features (1913-1915). Mix wanted to make movies in authentic locales and it's easy to see why he chose this little town 60 miles northeast of Santa Fe at the base of the Sangre de Cristo mountains: there are 918 buildings on the National Register of Historic Places and these streets were once walked by the likes of Billy the Kid, Doc Holliday (who owned a saloon here before he kept his rendezvous with history in Tombstone), and Bob Ford (who owned a saloon here after he shot Jesse James).

I stayed at the Plaza Hotel, which was called "the Belle of the Southwest" when it was built in 1882 before the other Las Vegas was even a railroad stop. There are 36 Victorian guest rooms, the Landmark restaurant, and a saloon that on some nights struck me as being as lively as "Gunsmoke's" Longbranch in Dodge City on a Saturday night. I was pleased to discover that the door to my room opened by turning a metal key in a lock instead of the near-universal modern method of sliding a plastic card into a slot to elicit an electronic blip - a sense of history is symbolized by just such small connections, although I should mention that the Plaza isn't so connected with the 19th century that it doesn't have Internet access and cablevision. It does have a resident ghost. My room was 308 and as the story goes 310 is frequently visited by the ghost of a past owner of the hotel, who tends to prefer the company of women.

Directly across the street from the hotel is the Old Town Plaza, a park whose picturesque ambience is provided by huge elms and maples and an old-fashioned gazebo, a genteel contrast with some of the history, specifically the time in the 1880s when vigilantes took two men out of the Old Town Jail and brought them to the Plaza Windmill to hang (although they were shot before it could be accomplished).

Las Vegas is a town of fewer than 15,000 people, and the best way to see it is by going for a walk. At the Chamber of Commerce Visitor's Center you can pick up a detailed illustrated book created by the Citizens' Committee for Historic Preservation that outlines walking tours in the different sections of town. The Visitor's Center also has some great photographs on display, especially fascinating to me those taken in saloons in the 1880s that show the patrons confronting the camera with drop-dead stares - authentic hard-case tough customers preserved in time for our consideration. In one picture, I was surprised to notice what seemed unmistakably to be a pineapple among the backbar bottles and glasses and wondered just how common pineapples were in New Mexico in the 1880s.

The architecture of Las Vegas runs a gamut from one-story adobes to grand Victorians and all sorts of other 19th century styles: Queen Anne, Italianate, Greek and Roman Revival. At the corner of Sixth and Washington Streets one encounters the 1898 Lowery House, which has been described as "a cottage pretending to be a mansion." With its three roof-styles, conical corner tower, Ionic columns, and spindle porch railings it looks like it would be appropriate in the suburbs of Oz. At Sixth and Columbia streets, the 1881 Mueller House has a three-story octagonal tower that overlooks Carnegie Park and the Carnegie Library, which was built in 1903 and modeled after Thomas Jefferson's Monticello.

There are scores of other vintage buildings to check out in town, but arguably the premier architectural attraction is five miles outside of town, the old Montezuma Hotel, a fortress-like red sandstone Queen Anne edifice reminiscent of the Overlook in Stephen King's "The Shining." Today, the Montezuma is the main building of the Armand Hammer United World College of the American West, an international campus offering foreign students two years of liberal arts education. The campus proper is closed to visitors but they can have a literally colorful experience by visiting the Dwan Light Sanctuary, a place of reflection for people of all beliefs where the building's prisms are aligned to capture the light rays of the sun, moon and stars, and interacting spectrums create moving ribbons of bright color on the walls, ceiling and floor, pure color reminiscent of that in an old MGM musical movie.

The population of Las Vegas is 82 percent Hispanic, so it shouldn't be surprising that finding good Mexican food is not exactly a matter of serendipity. About two blocks from the Plaza, walking along Bridge Street, I discovered Estella's Cafe, which might be the best Mexican restaurant in New Mexico. This is the definitive Mom & Pop place, still doing business after more than half a century, and there's no tricked-up quaint decor designed to appeal to upscale tourists, just food as authentic as any you're liable to find outside an actual family kitchen.

There are no restaurants along the lines of the other Las Vegas' Chinois or Le Cirque, but there are several with inconspicuous ambience that serve excellent food. The Mexican Kitchen is one of those, with memorable combination plates featuring four items (invariably there are only three in the San Francisco restaurants I'm used to). Charlie's Spic & Span Bakery & Cafe is another and its bakery items are fantastic, among them cream puffs that are the pasty equivalent of New York's Stage Delicatessen's deli sandwiches. With a nod toward more genteel dining, there is La Trattoria in the old El Fidel Hotel, serving Italian fare with some French influence, compliments of affable chef Edouard Waffelaert. And the tequila and lime-enhanced salmon I had at Blackjack's Grill was memorable in spite of the distractions of five lively female dinner companions.

Some of those I was with in Las Vegas were motivated to rise with the sun and hike into a box canyon in the Las Vegas National Wildlife Refuge with the hope of catching glimpses of some of the more than 270 species of birds therein, but being more history-oriented, I opted for the less kinetic appeal of such things as the Rough Riders Museum on a tour of the ruins of Fort Union.

The Rough Riders Museum is in a small building downtown and has a fascinating collection of memorabilia (saddles, uniforms, medals weapons, flags, etc.) telling the story of the Volunteer Calvary unit in which Teddy Roosevelt served during the Spanish-American War and whose history is linked with Las Vegas since 1899 when the veterans had their first reunion there attended by rodeo events, ballroom dancing and an encampment in Lincoln Park.

In 1899, Fort Union, which dates back to 1851, had been closed for just a few years. The ruins of the fort constitute an outdoor museum site 20 miles north of Las Vegas and not much is left but some adobe walls and stone building foundations. Yet this was an installation of such colossal size that touring the ruins made me think of Machu Picchu. This was the largest fort on the southwestern frontier and a huge storehouse facility, with as many as 1,600 troops stationed here. Touring the site with a diagram and trying to visualize the way it once was is a challenge to the imagination, and one's interest is perked by the fact that this is one museum where the visitors are cautioned to be on the lookout for rattlesnakes.

Finally, sobered to the point of solemnity by the infusion of so much dramatic history, I found myself at the Victory Ranch unexpectedly having a warm-and-fuzzy experience. There are no cayuses and cattle at the 1,100-acre Victory Ranch but rather a herd of alpacas, in 22 different colors, shorn and unshorn, the former looking a little like Spielbergian aliens and all of them eager to snuffle grain out of your hand. The ubiquitous herd/guard dogs compete with them for your attention and the whole scene is reminiscent of the painting "The Peaceable Kingdom" by Edward Hicks. There's also a 3,000 square-foot gift shop and clothing store and you can even buy a live alpaca if that's your pleasure: they get along with horses, cattle, sheep, cats and dogs, eat less than two pounds of hay a day, and one can be bought for as little as the reasonable price of my room for four days at the Plaza Hotel.

Larry Tritten is a veteran freelance writer who lives in San Francisco. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, Vanity Fair, Playboy, Rolling Stone, Travel & Leisure, many other magazines and major metropolitan newspapers, and includes more than 200 published short stories.