Sin City looks boring in stamp depicting suburb

The U.S. Postal Service has just given Las Vegas a massive reality check, and perhaps also a backhanded compliment.

Here's what happened:

The fine folks who deliver our mail came out with some new stamps this month, which happens to be National Stamp Collecting Month.

These stamps are called Earthscapes Forever. They come in slats of 15. They feature aerial shots of some impressive slices of America. An Alaskan glacier, the Mount St. Helens volcano, a monstrous hot spring in Yellowstone National Park.

"It was meant to showcase the diverse landscapes we have across America," says Mark Saunders, a postal spokesman.

Las Vegas is featured on this slat of stamps.

So which iconic hotel-casino did the kingmakers at the Postal Service choose to represent Sin City? Or maybe they took an overall shot of the Strip at night, right? Maybe Neonopolis? UNLV? Showgirls?

Nope.

They picked a stock photo of the 'burbs.

The shot "provides a maze of pavement, sidewalks, and single-family homes," the promotional material says.

Oooh, lordy, that's impressive.

Or not.

It's a shot of some generic subdivision in some generic corner of town, all reddish-brown roofs and stucco and twisty streets, palm trees and backyard pools, rubber-stained driveways and dead-end cul-de-sacs.

"Yeah," says a chuckling Robert Fielden, an urban planner and architect who came to town nearly 50 years ago. "That's Las Vegas."

Fielden has been fighting the subdivision-ization of Las Vegas for decades. He's losing, obviously, but he's not giving up.

He does, though, recognize reality. Las Vegas is what it is - not what the tourists think it is.

"I think of the Strip as being our kind of industrial and manufacturing area," he says.

What he means is that our lives in the suburbs can be quite separate from the parts of Las Vegas that made this town famous.

Las Vegas, the fastest-growing metro area in the nation over the past two decades, is the suburbs.

It is fitting, then, that the Postal Service chose that image.

"That's probably a great portrait of what Las Vegas is," Fielden says, sounding sad.

He says we don't have neighborhoods here, we have subdivisions.

"There's a sense of place and a sense of pride that comes with a neighborhood," he says. "Subdivisions don't have that."

Karen Danielsen, a professor for University of Nevada, Las Vegas' Greenspun College of Urban Affairs, says Las Vegas has a lot to offer despite the Southwestern sameness of its suburbs.

She has only been here a few years now, coming from the Washington, D.C., area.

She says she is impressed. There's plenty to do here, the traffic isn't nearly as bad as it is back East, and the weather is pretty awesome.

But she's not enamored with the bland suburbs.

"The spectacular growth is the only spectacular thing about it," she says.

Both she and Fielden do see a bright spot.

Fielden, the veteran, says there are alternatives to the developer-driven growth model we've always lived by. It'll take a politician or two with guts, not just people who pander.

But, he says, if we can re-establish what he calls the "urburbs" - that's the ring between the urban core and the outer suburbs - we can enjoy life in real neighborhoods that aren't all identical.

They will have mixed-use areas, they will be pedestrian-friendly, they will have amenities of their own.

"When that next stamp comes out," he says, full of hope, "it'll show something completely different."

Danielsen, the newcomer, sees things a little differently.

"What if it's a backhanded compliment?" she says of the suburb-photo-represents-Las Vegas angle.

Huh?

Maybe the fact that someone important thought of Las Vegas and did not immediately choose a photo of a showgirl or a bunch of pink and blue neon means that we have finally established ourselves as a real, honest-to-goodness place, not just Disneyland in the desert.

"Maybe," she says," it means we've arrived in some weird way."

Contact reporter Richard Lake at rlake@reviewjournal .com or 702-383-0307.