This week, I’ve got a cover story in Vegas Seven that traces the development of the precursor of today’s Strip retail boom, Hawaiian Marketplace:
You’re walking south down las Vegas Boulevard, past a nondescript strip mall promising beer, wine and four-for-$9.99 T-shirts when you see it: the carved head of a bronze-helmeted warrior poking serenely out of a landscaped planter, faded 7-Eleven banners flapping in the background. With only scaffolding visible behind it, the warrior looks out of place but not out of place—another artifact beached on the Strip shoreline, divorced from logic and context.
And yet that warrior is there for a reason. He’s a sentinel guarding the approach to a development that, 10 years ago, saw the future of the Strip.
I thought this was a story the deserved writing because (a) it’s been ten years since Hawaiian Marketplace opened and (b) it doesn’t seem to have gotten the recognition that current trends would indicate it deserves.