The boom in casinos

They blew up the venerable New Frontier hotel and gambling casino in Las Vegas this week. With festivities, pyrotechnics and 1,000 lbs of artfully arranged explosives, the 16-story tower keeled over sideways, and the 1942 landmark, Vegas' first "theme" gambling casino and the land site of Elvis' introduction in town, was a field of rubble. It will be replaced by a multibillion-dollar casino and resort.

At least four extravagance megahotels and gambling gambling casinos are to open up nearby, most of them on land sites where earlier hotels and casinos had been blown up. Implosions of unnecessary or unwanted edifices are a regular happening in American life and most especially in Las Vegas. There are Web land sites devoted to the explosive destruction of its celebrated casinos: Aladdin, Dunes, Sands, Landmark, Hacienda, Boardwalk, Castaways, Elevation Rancho, Stardust (last March) and now New Frontier.

They were replaced by composites that are bigger, more than than garish, more over the top - significance they, too, in clip are likely to be replaced by something more excessive. In the process, we look to have got created a new American word form of common people art: the gambling casino implosion.