The saga of the sage of the Strip

A few blocks from the home I moved into last month is a synagogue. This is certainly not surprising, as Las Vegas has one of the fastest-growing Jewish communities in the U.S. But a little over a decade ago, the area I am living in now was empty desert. So how, among the cloistered, gated subdivisions, did a synagogue appear between my house and the nearest gas station? In his 2002 book “Neon Metropolis: How Las Vegas Started the Twenty-First Century,” historian Hal Rothman, in a chapter titled “Community From Nothingness,” records the story of the creation of Midbar Kodesh (Holy Desert). In fact, Rothman, who died of Lou Gehrig’s disease last month at 48, was one of the synagogue’s founders.

It isn’t every academic historian whose work takes on such personal terms. Yet Las Vegas just passed the century mark, with its astronomical growth and constant change defining the last two decades, and Rothman recognized that history is being created right now by those who live here, even historians.

Rothman came here in 1992, not to make the town his subject but to teach at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, in his areas of academic interest: environmental history and the National Park Service. However, he arrived just in time to watch the mega-resort era unfold. As the new Vegas shot up around him, he was smitten.

As his UNLV colleague and fellow philosopher of Vegas, art critic Dave Hickey, puts it: “Las Vegas co-opts everyone completely. It is very seductive.”

So, in “Neon Metropolis,” Rothman became one of the first to dig deep into the meaning of Vegas beyond the glitzy surface (another book he edited was titled “The Grit Beneath the Glitter”) to comprehend these changes as history and as sociology and, most important, examine the effect all the growth and transformation had on daily life for Las Vegans.

In “Neon Metropolis,” Rothman notes: “Las Vegas had gone from gambling to gaming to tourism to entertainment -- the culture of the future.... Rapid growth had obliterated the old company town and replaced it with the postmodern metropolis, the leading tourist destination in the world and the only city in the world devoted to the consumption of entertainment.”

Certainly what Vegas had

to teach the rest of the nation has long received some notice,

in the once-a-decade Time

magazine cover story, books such as Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” and the architecture criticism of “Learning From Las Vegas” by Robert Venturi, Steven Izenour and Denise Scott Brown. After “Neon Metropolis” appeared, Rothman became

the media darling on the topic, quoted in seemingly every

newspaper, documentary and book on the subject.

His idea of Vegas became dogma, and few saw Las Vegas as so crucial to the country and the world as Hal Rothman: “From its roots in sin, Las Vegas has grown into the most malleable tourist destination on the planet. It makes the visitor, however ordinary, the center of the story, holding up a figurative mirror and asking: ‘What do you want to be, and what will you pay to be it?’ Who you were or what you were yesterday makes little difference. All tourist towns reflect desire -- but Las Vegas anticipates it.”

On another level, he notes that a large, well-paid unionized service industry workforce has allowed blue-collar families to earn enough in the last decade to live in the same newly built, gated neighborhoods as the professional classes. He looked beyond the Strip to see how residents in these newly built neighborhoods interact in such a transitional and intermingled society. He himself, born in Louisiana and a onetime L.A. resident, was an avid biker, Little League supporter, local columnist, husband and father of two.

Finally, Rothman examined the one thing rarely mentioned: all of the ways Las Vegas is becoming more typical of any and every other American city, with issues such as air and water quality, strains on limited public transportation, social services and even the controlling powers of homeowner associations. Especially in ways outside gambling, Rothman saw Vegas as the future of the country, noting, for example, that the area’s mix of 20% affluent retirees and 20% impoverished Latinos, who are the retirees’ caregivers and groundskeepers, might well reflect the rest of the country as baby boomers retire.

“Hal put his finger on a lot of the problems here, and how the city is coming up with interesting solutions,” says Hickey. “This town may lack culture and wisdom, but the general intelligence is in very high quantity around here. But there is just no hesitation here between the thought and the act. These are very bright people, but this is not a contemplative town. To think it is to do it.... Hal really got that and could explain it. Hal really thought about Las Vegas, and he is a huge loss.”

In many ways, Rothman was the Las Vegas equivalent of Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. But instead of our nation’s Camelot, Rothman found inspiration and depths in the Strip that offered only an Excalibur and now even has “Spamalot.”

For more on what’s happening on and off the Strip, see latimes.com/movablebuffet.