It was nearly 30 years ago when The New York Times Magazine riled the waters of suburbia/exurbia with a cover story. “The Devil in Long Island” was writer Ron Rosenbaum’s review of the seemingly large amount of strange doings in Nassau and Suffolk Counties. That’s the home to a collection of bedroom communities, now with 2.9 million residents, stretching eastward for 100 miles from New York City along the continental U.S.’s largest island. Published on August 22, 1993, the much-commented-upon 9,000-word article distressed local leaders who, among other things, thought it would hurt economic development by unfairly stigmatizing the area.
Now that I have become New To Las Vegas, I think I have found the Southwest equivalent of the nearby diabolic inferno Rosenbaum described. It is the huge but exceedingly thinly populated Nye County. The jurisdiction is a stretch of mountains, desert, desolate mining ghost towns and a Death Valley National Park portion immediately to the west and northwest of Clark County, home of Las Vegas. Like Long Island, Nye County is often in the news for lousy reasons–amazingly so, given its tiny population of just 53,000.
In perhaps their most infamous moment, Nye County voters in 2018 overwhelmingly elected a dead pimp–brothel owner Dennis Hof, who croaked right before the election–to the Nevada Assembly.
’nuff said. Continue reading
