News-Pilot from San Pedro, California • 41

A walk on the strip In the balmy desert night air Is to see American leisure at Its best A orty years ago it was just a lonely desert highway roadsides populated only by wildlife the burro the iackrabbit and the hitchhiking barfly Las Vegas was still five miles away down at the intersection of Fremont and Main Street where the classier visitors still dismounted from the Union Pacifics crack Desert Wind Today you can walk miles along the former Los Angeles Highway now called the Las Vegas Strip without seeing a single square foot of unpaved desert Building hasn't quit since 1946 when Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel built his Miami-moderne Flamingo Hotel in the untamed West beside that highway near what is now the corner of Flamingo Road And the magic mix of concrete and neon has spread more than two miles north to the Sahara at the city limits of Las Vegas proper and more than a mile south to tne Tropicana and Hacienda Now casinos crowd the side streets as well Even Bugsy Siegel would have been amazed by the immensity of the ball he got rolling His own Flamingo was just a glorified motel basically a one-story structure with 105 guest rooms Today it is the Flamingo Hilton 28 stories tall with 2250 rooms and an 800-room expansion under construction When it is finished it will be the second largest resort hotel in the world exceeded only by its nearby sister the 3 1 74-room Las Vegas Hilton And even the third-largest will be just across Flamingo Road: the 2832-room Ballys Grand Las Vegas The gigantic scale extends to other aspects or the Strip The sprawling neon sign in front of the Stardust Hotel is a tourist attraction in its own right containing 30 miles of wiring 30 tons of steel and 40000 lightbulbs programmed to go on and off in entertaining sequences Its 18 stories tall but the sign at the Sahara has it beat by four stories Aih'cilisttui Supplement 8.