ABSTRACT
Las Vegas has the distinction of being the second most popular tourist attraction in the United States. Las Vegas is exceeded only, in popularity for tourists both foreign and domestic by Times Square. But New York City has eight million inhabitants and around forty-five million visitors in a given year and Las Vegas has 550,000 inhabitants in Nevada, a state with a total population of 2,500,000 people. The travel writer Jan Morris picked up on an aspect of Las Vegas connected to its penchant for keeping secrets. Las Vegas is a city where risk dominates and where the darker elements in human beings are encouraged. For Morris, the symbols of Las Vegas are the gray concrete walls that surround people's homes in Las Vegas and the bizarre agoraphobic Howard Hughes, who lived on the ninth floor of his hotel, the Desert Inn, and owned, at one time, many hotels in Las Vegas.
