Contract for the railroad to supply water to the Las Vegas Land and Water Company. Contract Audit Number 7322 by Los Angeles & Salt Lake Railroad Company

Discussion of the courts holding the water district to the Anti-metering law.

Las Vegas tourists who stop to admire the Mirage volcano, the Bellagio conservatory, the Wynn Las Vegas mountain, the Encore gardens, and the iconic Welcome to Las Vegas sign’s surroundings on the Las Vegas Strip likely do not realize that in each case they have sampled a unique landscape environment conceived by Don Brinkerhoff of Lifescapes International, Newport Beach, California. It is for producing work of this caliber that in 2016 the American Gaming Association selected Brinkerhoff to be the first designer inducted into the Gaming Hall of Fame. In this interview, the Los Angeles native and son of a working-class father and an artist/schoolteacher mother, explains how he spent his youth in an owner-built house in the modest suburb of El Monte, where he tended the family truck garden. Despite earning his degree in ornamental horticulture at California Polytechnic (Cal Poly), Don felt unschooled in the arts because the small school did not teach them. To fill that educational gap, Don took his wife and four children to Europe for two years, where he affiliated with the American Academy in Rome and worked for TAC (The Architects' Collaborative) in Greece among other adventures. The family spent another six months in Hawaii, where the children attended school and Don worked with a local landscape architect. The family’s unusual work, school, and travel experience more than completed Don’s arts education and shaped his world view and that of his daughter Julie in countless ways that came to silently benefit the Las Vegas built environment. Upon returning to California in 1968, Brinkerhoff opened his Orange County office, and Lifescapes International became the “go-to” firm to create water features for condominium projects. This work led to his first hotel-casino project at a Sun City golf course condominium project in South Africa, which in turn led to a telephone call from architect Joel Bergman inviting him to become one of three candidate landscape architects to work with Steve Wynn on what would become The Mirage hotel-casino in Las Vegas. Here, Brinkerhoff speaks to his design philosophy as ninety percent problem-solving and ten percent inspiration even as he describes organizing the signature tree for The Mirage, building the Mirage volcano, taking the idea for Bellagio’s conservatory from the DuPont family’s Longwood Gardens, of creating faux banyans in the Mirage atrium, of creating the model for the Las Vegas Strip median, and of building the mountain on Las Vegas Boulevard in front of Wynn Las Vegas to conceal the Cloud at the Fashion Show Mall. While the fortunes of Lifescapes International continue to grow and succeed worldwide, both Don and Julie credit Steve Wynn and their Las Vegas work: “Las Vegas has totally changed our lives.”

Born in 1936, architect Joel Bergman spent his childhood in Venice, California, the son of Edythe Klein and Harry Bergman, a baker who later turned to dealing in scrap metal. The award-winning designer of such Las Vegas projects as the International Hotel, the MGM Grand Hotel (later Bally's), additions to the Riviera Hotel and the Golden Nugget downtown, the Mirage, Treasure Island, Paris Casino Resort, Caesars Palace, Trump International Hotel and Tower, the Signature at MGM Grand, Rhumbar, Gilley's at Treasure Island, and the Tropicana Hotel and Casino first arrived in Las Vegas in 1968 to work on the International Hotel. In this interview, Bergman discusses his architectural career, which began with his graduation in architecture from the University of Southern California; he also discusses his work with Martin Stern, his sixteen years with Steve Wynn, and the formation of his own architectural firm, Bergman Walls and Associates. Throughout, he pays tribute to the three mentors who had the greatest influence on his work—USC architecture professor Carleton Winslow, architect Berton Severson, and client Steve Wynn—and the ways they visualized people moving through space. He acknowledges other professionals whose work he admired and talks about his wives Marlene Federman, Terrie Colston, Maria Nicolini, and Valentina Bogdanova as well as his children and stepchildren. Joel David Bergman passed away August 24, 2016, three weeks after he gave this interview.

Bracken wrote to the company lawyer to find a permanent solution to a yearly problem of gate vandalism at the Stewart burial plot.