Combine Las Vegas with San Francisco/Bay Area

As it says on the tin. People are still flocking in to blow their wages at the casinos, catch Wayne Newton at the Sands, or just eye the kitschy architecture, but you can also get easy access to not-quite-legal psychedelics on every street corner, cruise the proudly free-wheeling gay bar scene, or hook up with one of the New Age communes that are permanent fixtures on the city's outskirts. And it all just kinda jives together effortlessly.

Oh, and it still has to be located where Las Vegas is now.

One thing I could think is to maybe increase the number of universities in the area, give the city a few more insitutitions that attract the type who made Berkeley so famous in the 1960s. Also, maybe if the mob takes a greater business interest in the kind of drugs that were popular with the counterculture. Though that might run the risk of alienating Middle America, probably the biggest customer for the casinos.
 
Counterculture and casino glitz in one location? While we're at it, why not go for the trifecta and have prostitution legal in Clark County also? That way, you could go to Vegas, blow your money, blow your mind, and...well, you know the rest, all in one trip. :biggrin:
 
Counterculture and casino glitz in one location? While we're at it, why not go for the trifecta and have prostitution legal in Clark County also? That way, you could go to Vegas, blow your money, blow your mind, and...well, you know the rest, all in one trip. :biggrin:

Tune in, turn tricks, cash out.
 
Sounds like the San Fancisco Gold Coast back in the 19th Century.

Yeah, okay. I can kinda see that. From wiki...

The Barbary Coast is the haunt of the low and the vile of every kind. The petty thief, the house burglar, the tramp, the whoremonger, lewd women, cutthroats, murderers, all are found here. Dance-halls and concert-saloons, where blear-eyed men and faded women drink vile liquor, smoke offensive tobacco, engage in vulgar conduct, sing obscene songs and say and do everything to heap upon themselves more degradation, are numerous. Low gambling houses, thronged with riot-loving rowdies, in all stages of intoxication, are there. Opium dens, where heathen Chinese and God-forsaken men and women are sprawled in miscellaneous confusion, disgustingly drowsy or completely overcome, are there. Licentiousness, debauchery, pollution, loathsome disease, insanity from dissipation, misery, poverty, wealth, profanity, blasphemy, and death, are there. And Hell, yawning to receive the putrid mass, is there also.

— Asbury, in Benjamin Estelle Lloyd's Lights and Shades of San Francisco (1876)[28]

Though the denizens of the Barbary Coast probably didn't see themselves as any sort of counterculture, for them debauchery was just an end in itself, as in Vegas. (Though if Joan Didion is to be believed, debauchery was its own telos for a lot of people in Haight-Ashbury during the Summer Of Love as well.)

link
 

Kaze

Banned
If you want a Geographic way of doing it - massive earthquake makes San Fran's bay larger.

or... Time Machine - the years 1848 - 1850's, San Fran was the Vegas of the US. All thanks to the gold rush and people deciding that they can't make money in the gold fields, but they can make money off the miners at the casino.
 
Would a successful state of Deseret with different border claims so as to include the proposed areas (and possibly take out others to make the region more focused for the scenario) make this any more likely?
250px-State_of_Deseret%2C_vector_image_cropped_-_2011.svg.png

(Picture from Wikipedia)
 
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