Las Vegas Weekly

August 5, 2010 · 8 PM

Cooling trend: Forbes survey has Las Vegas (with New York) as the country’s hippest city

By John Katsilometes

Half of the rooms at Rumor Las Vegas, on Harmon Avenue at Paradise Road, feature views of the pool area.

Photo: Sam Morris

For years the inhabitant of the bottom of good lists and the top of bad lists, Las Vegas today sits stylishly atop a good list. Forbes magazine has listed Las Vegas as the No. 1 coolest city in the United States.

Las Vegas also is coming off its hottest month ever, but this has nothing to do with temperature.

Sharing the top spot is New York. Forbes compiled the list by retraining the Harris polling association, which asked 2,104 adults from the United States which of the 40 largest metropolitan areas in the country were the "coolest." Las Vegas actually tied for first with New York City, followed in order by Seattle, Chicago, Oakland (!), Orlando (!!), San Diego, Los Angeles, Miami and Washington D.C.

"It shows the strength of the Las Vegas brand," said Vince Alberta, Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority vice president in charge of public affairs. "Visitors come here to have fun and there's no time limit on fun in Vegas, and no better place in the world to visit."

There was no specific criteria stated during polling, which might explain how Oakland finished No. 5 and San Francisco was not listed among the top 10 finishers (even as the Oakland entry in the story's slideshow is a photo of two dogs posed in front of the Golden Gate Bridge). It could also explain how the hip cultural center of Miami was No. 9, and Orlando (home, sort of, to Disney World) landed No. 6.

As Forbes noted:

"Coolness is elusive and hard to define. To see whether perceptions of coolness matched up with reality — or at least how much fun a city offered — we compared coolness rankings against the number of bars, nightclubs, restaurants, museums, galleries, live theater venues and sports stadiums in each city, using data from AOL City Guides.

"Many of the cities perceived to be cool have one thing in common: an abundance of things to do. And in a lot of cases, a city's coolness ranking aligned nearly perfectly with the number of venues: The Minneapolis–St. Paul metro, for example, ranks 12th for the number of nightlife venues, and 14th on our coolness list. But there were notable exceptions to this trend."

Of Las Vegas, the magazine said:

"Times have been tough in Las Vegas, NV, and the city is suffering a real estate crash that's among the worst in the country. But the entertainment mecca still welcomes 36 million tourists per year—and the city's relaxed laws around gambling and other vices add to its sense of danger and excitement.

"Las Vegas has a reputation for attracting pensioners who come to while the day away at slot machines. But in fact, respondents between 18 and 34 years old thought Las Vegas was cooler than New York. A full 11% of that age group gave Sin City the "coolest" badge. Still, while they might imagine it to be a happening place, trendy young folks don't account for the majority of visitors to the city. According to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, the average age of vacationers in 2009 was 50."

You know what's really nutty about this list, aside from Oakland-Orlando and the absence of San Francisco and Austin, Tex., among many other cities, is that many of the new architectural design effects for Vegas resorts are being copped from Miami. No. 9 Miami. The Siegel Group has embraced a South Beach-style theme for Rumor, its new boutique hotel on Harmon Boulevard across from the Hard Rock Hotel. And the Tropicana's $165 million makeover also is South Beach-inspired.

Maybe it has something to do with the climate. As we say here, it's a dry cool.

Follow John Katsilometes on Twitter at twitter.com/JohnnyKats.

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