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Transcript of interview with Craig Palacios by Stefani Evans and Claytee White, September 27, 2016

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2016-09-27

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Craig Palacios was born on November 1, 1971 and grew up in the Paradise Palms neighborhood in Las Vegas, Nevada. His family lived close to him and he remembers playing with his relatives up and down the Maryland Parkway Corridor. His first job was in construction where he poured and finished concrete. His talents for design became apparent and he began a new job as a swimming pool designer. Craig’s first company was a concrete company, but he later had to close its doors. After that, Craig decided to attend college and graduated with degrees in Architecture and Art History from UNLV in 2005. He worked for YWS Architecture for a few years before opening his own studio in 2011. Since then, BunnyFish Studio has worked on the Downtown Project and the Maryland Parkway Project.

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OH_02842_book

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OH-02842
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Palacios, Craig S. Interview, 2016 September 27. OH-02842. [Transcript.] Oral History Research Center, Special Collections & Archives, University Libraries, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Las Vegas, Nevada.

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i AN INTERVIEW WITH CRAIG PALACIOS An Oral History Conducted by Stefani Evans and Claytee D. White The Building Las Vegas Oral History Project Oral History Research Center at UNLV University Libraries University of Nevada Las Vegas ii ©The Building Las Vegas Oral History Project University of Nevada Las Vegas, 2016 Produced by: The Oral History Research Center at UNLV University Libraries Director: Claytee D. White Editor: Stefani Evans, Franklin Howard Transcribers: Kristin Hicks, Frances Smith Interviewers: Stefani Evans, Claytee D. White Project Manager: Stefani Evans iii The recorded interview and transcript have been made possible through the generosity of the UNLV University Libraries. The Oral History Research Center enables students and staff to work together with community members to generate this selection of first-person narratives. The participants in this project thank the University for the support given that allowed an idea and the opportunity to flourish. The transcript received minimal editing that includes the elimination of fragments, false starts, and repetitions in order to enhance the reader’s understanding of the material. All measures have been taken to preserve the style and language of the narrator. In several cases photographic sources accompany the individual interviews. The following interview is part of a series of interviews conducted under the auspices of the Building Las Vegas Oral History Project. Claytee D. White Director, Oral History Research Center University Libraries University Nevada, Las Vegas iv PREFACE Craig Palacios was born on November 1, 1971 and grew up in the Paradise Palms neighborhood in Las Vegas, Nevada. His family lived close to him and he remembers playing with his relatives up and down the Maryland Parkway Corridor. His first job was in construction where he poured and finished concrete. His talents for design became apparent and he began a new job as a swimming pool designer. Craig’s first company was a concrete company, but he later had to close its doors. After that, Craig decided to attend college and graduated with degrees in Architecture and Art History from UNLV in 2005. He worked for YWS Architecture for a few years before opening his own studio in 2011. Since then, BunnyFish Studio has worked on the Downtown Project and the Maryland Parkway Project.v TABLE OF CONTENTS Interview with Craig Palacios September 27, 2016 in Las Vegas, Nevada Conducted by Stefani Evans and Claytee D. White Preface………………………………………………………………..…….……………iv Craig describes his childhood neighborhood of Paradise Palms, where his family and the families of his father’s four brothers all lived nearby; remembers the Culinary Union Hall; discusses extended family life as a child of Ecuadoran immigrants; talks of working in construction as a teenager and explains concrete work and his work as a concrete finisher at the World Market Center. Explains how he came to design swimming pools, founded his own company, and lost it during the 2009 Recession. Speaks to his college education at Seattle Central and UNLV and discusses what inspired him to his career in architecture. Talks about architectural projects such as the John E. Carlton building, Carson Kitchen in Downtown Las Vegas, and the Downtown Project; gives the history of the mural on the side of his Downtown office building; describes the bid process for architecture work and discusses his bid and plan for the Maryland Parkway Project; explains how design can encourage people to shop, visit, and live in walkable urban spaces rather than in auto-centric suburbs…………………………………………… 1–17 Craig describes his sidewalk design plan; recalls memories of the Maryland Parkway Corridor; discusses dangers to pedestrians along Maryland Parkway and ways to make streets slower and safer; ponders the process and complications of installing light rail on Maryland Parkway; explains urbanism movements and reflects on Downtown Las Vegas, comparing it to California; relates the history of BunnyFish Studio………………...17–32 vi 1 S: This is Stefani Evans and Claytee White. It is September 27, 2016, and we are in the offices of BunnyFish Studio with Craig Palacios. Mr. Palacios, may I ask you to pronounce and spell your first and last name please. I am Craig Palacios. C-R-A-I-G P-A-L-A-C-I-O-S. S: Let's begin by you telling us a little bit about your early life. Tell us about your parents and what they did for a living and where you and your siblings were raised. I moved to the Paradise Palms neighborhood by Eastern [Avenue] and [East] Desert Inn [Road] when I was two. My life was cool. I was raised in the Eastern and Desert Inn area. My dad's brother lived two houses down with his family, and my dad's other brother lived one street away on Burnham. George, who lived on the other street, had a son Eric who was two years older than me. On Seneca [Drive] and Desert Inn my dad's other brother lived, and he had two boys, Michael and Sean. Sean was a year younger than me, and Michael was a year older. It was Sean, me, Michael, and Eric. I have a five-year-old now, so all I do and think about now is life, and childhood, and all of these things. I just had my twenty-fifth-year reunion. One of the drivers for attending my twenty-fifth-year reunion was reuniting with people and realizing that in a lot of ways I wasn't that great of a friend. Part of the reason was that I didn't need to be. It wasn't like I was unfriendly, or mean, or anything like that; but having that built-in network, we [my cousins and I] were our own group, and other people would come and go. All these years later, I am thinking I wish I had gotten to know that guy better, or I wish I had spent more time with them, but there really wasn't any time. We would be dropped off at each other's house when we were really young. After I was born my mom went back to work on the Union Hall list. They [my mom and my aunts] 2 worked waitressing banquets. It was a cool job because they could go to the Hall and get work if they wanted it or they could not. Every once in a while we would go to the Union Hall on Saturdays and hang out there and wait for their number to be called and go. S: When you talk about the Union Hall can you specify the union and the location? It is the Culinary Union, and it is right up the street from where I live now, between Wyoming [Boulevard] and Oakey [Avenue] on Main [Street]. I think it is more computerized these days, but back then everybody used to park, and as these things happened, there was a sort of ecosystem that happened there. People would open their trunks and sell burritos, and other people would have minor garage sales. We kids would be hanging out with all of the other kids in the parking lot and on the stairs. Upstairs—this was back during the generation when people smoked—was where you would walk into this cloud of smoke. "Eight-eight, eighty-nine, ninety, you want it? Caesars Palace. Okay, one hundred." They would just go. My aunts would be gathered around, and [they would] be saying, "If it is Caesars I'll go. If it is Hilton I'll go. I hope I get whatever." They would try to work together and be together. Getting back to the closeness of our lives, we would all end up somewhere, in one of the houses, with the oldest cousin, Marcy, or with one of the aunts who wasn't working that night, watching us. As we got older, we could skateboard to each other's houses. It was a close arrangement. S: You knew that neighborhood like the back of your hand. Oh, my gosh, I still do. S: You could draw a map of it right now if we asked you. 3 We knew the elevation of certain curbs and gutters in our neighborhood. We had one we called "The Curb," because it was a place where this street came down, and that street came up, and there was this perfect skateboarding curb. That was Seneca and whatever the street is that is behind the Boulevard Mall. S: After this interview I am going to ask you to draw a map and show all the spots. (Figure 1) Every Monday night we had dinner together as a family. Back then, one of the aunts would cook, and there would be ten to twenty of us there. It was a nice lifestyle. Figure 1: Map of skateboard route through Paradise Palms neighborhood, Las Vegas, drawn September 27, 2016, by Craig Palacios. 4 S: Monday night family dinners, always? Always. Always. Always. Also included extended family at somebody's house, almost continual, either here in the United States, or some person living or visiting, or just a bunch of them would come down for a visit. That is the Ecuadoran side, and I am mainly focusing on that, but I had an equally strong English-Irish contingency on the other side. My mom comes from a big family, same thing: lots of family coming and going, lots of trips to England or Ireland. My mom's sister lived here with her daughters, who were very much a part of our family as well. I'm still very close with them. S: Your mother is first generation as well? Yes. They both immigrated to New York and met on a blind date in Queens. S: That is a great story. How did you end up going into architecture, and did any of your cousins follow you? No. We all took pretty different paths. I and my cousin Michael, who is the engineer, have the most similar paths. We spent a lot of our lives in construction. For some of the uncles it was very straightforward: "I don't want you to do what I'm doing. Go to college." For some of the other uncles their thinking was, "You can make all this money in construction, so why waste all those years?" I was on the side of "Just go out, and get a job, and get married, and have a nice house, and don't worry about the college thing." As a young guy I really wanted to be a fashion designer. What I have learned in my older years is that what I do in architecture—and this isn't the same for everybody because there are lots of different jobs in architecture, and it is probably the same in fashion, too—you are creating order, and it is aesthetic, and it has to last. As a young kid I wanted to be a fashion designer. That was never really taken seriously, to the point, never discussed. My 5 earliest job was in construction. I started working for a family business when I was, literally, fourteen or fifteen years old, wheel-barreling concrete, doing things like that. S: What was the name of the business? At the time it must have been H and H Concrete, Hoaglund and Hilley. One of the ladies from the Union Hall was Kathy Hoaglund, and her boys were in the Union parking lot on Saturdays. I don't want this to be taken wrong, but I went to the Union Hall about once every three months; it wasn't a lot. My mom and Kathy were very good friends, and her husband had a concrete company. I became very good friends with those boys and I am still good friends with them. They live in San Diego now and have a very extended family over there. We see each other as much as we can. That was my first job, helping out with the company. I did it for many years, as did Michael. He and I spent a lot of years building this city. The list of names of the buildings that either of us had a hand in building is very long. We worked on a lot of the Strip casinos; I worked on the World Market [Center]; I worked on CityCentre, and I worked on The Venetian Las Vegas and The Palazzo. There are a lot of them. C: Give me an idea what kind of work you did on those buildings, and tell me as someone who doesn't know what "concrete work" means. My first experience ever with concrete was I was given a half-full wheel barrow and told to drive it across the driveway, across the grass around the back to a new swimming pool, dump it, and come back and get another one. I was young and energetic and I was with my friends, so it was really great. Their dad did it for a living, so my friends would say, "We really hate this." I was thinking, "This is really awesome and I get paid, too." 6 Then it went into digging foundations and loading forms and taking forms off the truck and eventually pouring concrete. For the first couple of years it was mostly shoveling. The truck will dump it, and it mostly dumps it relatively flat; then there is a machine that flattens it, but in front of the machine you need to pull the concrete back with shovels while wearing rubber boots and being ankle deep in the concrete. Over the years I learned the trade, so I would be the person who flattened it or the person who finished it. Ultimately I ran big machinery, where you would be driving on it with big blades that would do the thing. That was my job for many, many years. S: On the World Market Center, what did you do for that? I was a concrete finisher. The trajectory was I poured concrete off and on from [when I was] fourteen to eighteen. Then at eighteen, when I graduated from high school, I got a concrete license. But being in people's backyards we would do the concrete and the landscaping. We would do these little environments, and that was great fun. We would do a lot of work around swimming pools. One of the swimming pool contractors offered me a job, and it was to come in and design swimming pools. That was the best job ever, because you would meet with people and listen to what they want, and you would draw it, and this other group would come in and build it. You would manage the process throughout, and then you would start the project up, and everybody is happy. Then go on to the next one. I did that for many years. Construction is a tough business and swimming pools particularly. They were going in and out of business, and there was all this hardship in the 1990s. I don't remember it being economy driven like some of the things we've seen. This is through the fourth or fifth bad economy I've lived through. I thought there was so much money in it, but I was a kid. The 7 company I was working for ran into trouble and went out of business, and I went to go work for another one. That wasn't great. The synergy there wasn't like the first company I was at. I went back and started my own construction business and got a little job, and then a bigger one, and some bigger ones. I started hiring some staff, and then I started getting some big equipment. We were a big company before I knew it, and then a contractor got a contract to do the big shopping center at Town Square and the Summerlin Parkway. He got referred to me by somebody, and he said, "Would you like to do this project?" I said, "We are too small." And he basically sat down with me and said, "We can help you out, and we will do fifteen-day pay rather than thirty-day pay, and everything like that." So we hired more staff and got more trucks and mobilized for this job and hired a contractor to do all the steel work and drill these big foundations. One day I came to the job and I was the only person on the job site. I thought, "Whoa, something is weird." I started making some phone calls. What had happened is that over the weekend, the guy I was working for, the contractor, was flying his personal plane into Las Vegas, got blown off the runway, and had died. The much more experienced contractors than me had pulled off the job and started talking to their lawyers and started to hunker down for what was coming. And what was coming was that nobody got paid. I thought I was going to be the really good guy and keep the project moving. I started spending more and more money, and ultimately I ended up losing my business. After that my wife and I had this conversation: "We don't have school. We don't have work. What do you want to do?" I said, "I need a break." We went to San Diego; the Hoaglund boys were there. I went to work for Eric Hoaglund and their dad. I worked with them for a couple of years and went surfing every day and got my head back on straight. My 8 wife is from Seattle, so we moved up to Seattle and we started going to school there. When I got some schooling under my belt, I was still pouring concrete all through these years, always for other people and lots of time for the Union. The lesson I learned from my mom is, when you have a heavy school load you don't take a job, and when you don't you take the jobs and work, so it is a great thing. S: This was at the University of Washington? This was at Seattle Central, a community college. Once you graduated with your degree from Seattle Central you had a direct entry into the University of Washington. But then I came back and looked at this school and I ended up coming back to Las Vegas and then Nicole followed me shortly. That was in 1999. Did some school and then went back [to Seattle] in 2000 to settle up some things and did my awesome summer in Seattle, the summers there are amazing. I came back for 2001 to start school. At Seattle Central I got an associate degree in Art. In Las Vegas, from 2001 to 2005 I got a BS in Architecture and a BA in Art History. Neither was a minor; they were actually two [Bachelor’s] degrees, and then I went onto do the Master’s degree. S: At UNLV? Yes. A little bit of the time during my undergraduate degree I was still pouring concrete at World Center and CityCentre. CityCentre is funny, because I poured the foundation at CityCentre, and then worked as a lead consultant for CityCentre, and then I did restaurant design at CityCentre, and I designed and worked on the Todd English Pub that is inside there. I ended up being part of the lead consultant group that was doing asset protection for MGM Mirage. I worked on that project for three to four years in different positions. C: Were you working on that project from your own company? 9 No. I haven't had my own company since 1992, until 2011, when I started this new architectural firm. A little bit more about concrete life. In Las Vegas, and it is a little bit like this in Seattle, you start at night and work through the night, because it is cool and because of circulation of concrete trucks. It made it easy to go to school during the day. S: What made you think architecture rather than construction? It just made sense; it gave me the design outlet that I wanted, and having spent so many years in construction it just seem to make sense. And ultimately it was a good decision, because I not only have the design sensibility but I also know how to build stuff. No disrespect to anyone out there, but a lot of architects will leave their mom and dad's house, go to a dorm, and then become an architect and maybe never even mowed a lawn or ever built something. I really know how things go together very well. In our world you typically have the guy who is aesthetically sensitive and he has the little glasses and the cute clothes, and then you have the guy who can build things, and he is has the big cigar and he would say, "I would never build a pink building." I like to believe, and I get this compliment a lot, that I can find my way in between somehow. C: Since BunnyFish, give me an idea of a project. Here at the John E. Carson Building, where we are having this interview, this is a perfect one. This is something that would be our favorite and typical project. It was a 64-unit Extended Stay Hotel. The rooms were 10' x 10'; it was men only, and they had shared toilets. So in a man's room there would be a sink, a closet, and a bed, and whatever else they decorated it with. It was a pretty rough lifestyle. S: When you say “this,” do you mean the building we are in now? 10 The building we are in now, but specifically the room we are in. This would be a man's room, and his toilet was down the hallway, shared shower. S: And this window wasn't in the wall? No. That's an addition. C: Tell me the size. 10' x 10'. S: So a twin bed, chest of drawers, perhaps. We did move this hallway a hair that way so this is maybe 10' x 12', but more or less like this room. When we came and measured the rooms people were still living here and there was the range from opening a door and having a big cloud of smoke comes out to the guy who has perfectly decorated Ikea furniture, and a laptop, and a computer to decorated with icons of Jesus and the Mother Mary, and everything in between. Our client relocated them and gutted the building down to zero. Even though these walls are more or less where they used to be, everything is done: new floor, new foundation, new structural system, new roof, new mechanical, new plumbing, new electrical. Subsequently we went on to design the Carson Kitchen, the Donut Shop and Juice Bar, Sushi Restaurant, and offices. Carson Kitchen, for example, is very much my project. We were so busy at the time that I was the only person that worked on it. We had a staff of four or five at the time, but we were tapped. If you look at Carson Kitchen I did the floor layout, the styling; I helped choose the menus; I did all the colors; I designed all the furniture, all of the tables, the tile. I designed the kitchen equipment; I designed the lighting. On a Sunday morning, right before they were going to open, me and my son came in there and played 11 some music and taped up everything behind the bar; and had a stencil made and painted the stencil that says, "Keep calm and Kerry on." C: Tell me about the roof. Isn't there seating? Yes, there is a rooftop deck. It is mostly opened on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. There was a green wall there, and now there is a big mural of Chef, who has passed away recently, and a great bar that is created out of a piece of granite in a location where, while it was being formed, river rock got smooshed into the granite. Within the granite counter top there are these round river rocks. It was day after day of sifting through the granite counter tops because we needed them to come from the same rock so that when we made it this long, it continued all the way across and didn't look like two pieces that were separate and together. The aesthetics are pretty simple. We don't worry too much about seeing pipes and ducts and stuff like that. C: So who lives in here now? This section where we are right now is mostly downtown food and beverage people who need a little office. The last project I did before I left the firm I was working at, YWS [Design & Architecture], was a 13,000 square-foot Chinese food restaurant for Hakkasan. The scale of that is pretty typical for the Strip. Most people's houses are 2,500 to 3,500 [square feet], this is three times that big. Down here, where we are at, we will build restaurants that are 1,000 square feet, and that is front-of-house and back-of-house, which is everything. So usually they end up with no office. If you have to have a conversation with an employee, they will rent these. When you go down here you will see napkins, and toilet paper, and plates, and a little desk where they can have staff discussions, and things like that. A lot on this side are food and beverage operators, like the Donut Bar and Sushi 12 Restaurant and some of these restaurants around here. On this side, 66 percent is taken over by the bowling internet company, and the front 33 percent is taken by BunnyFish Studio. When we opened we had a yoga studio, a flower shop, juice bar, Sushi, donut, tattoo, and Carson Kitchen. Most of that is still intact. Juice Bar seemed like they were doing well but their relationship is not a relationship anymore, so that is really hard on a business. The flower shop decided to go all-internet and not have a brick and mortar. I don't know what happened with the yoga studio. Right now it looks like we will fill that hole on that other side with a food and beverage operator. C: No living space any longer? No. Not here. We get people every once in a while looking for a hotel. One great night, when we had just first barely moved in, Tina and I were still trying to put together all the cabinets and trying to get the place operating. We went out on the balcony and we are sitting there having a glass of wine and a guy pops his head in. I was preparing to explain to him that it is no longer a hotel, and he said, "I know. I was just in the neighborhood having dinner with my son and I thought I would pop in and check it out before I headed back to Summerlin. I use to live here back in the day. I was a dealer over at the El Cortez, and it was fun times. We lived here. We would work like crazy and this lobby here, everybody would put in ten cents and the fund would go to buy coffee so there would always be fresh, hot, brewed coffee, because we were working long hours. We would rendezvous in the lobby and have a quick cup of coffee and check in with people and then we would head out for the evening or do other things." He showed us where he lived here. It was awesome, because by the time we got introduced to the place the people that mostly lived here were pretty much 13 down and out. To hear how this was a fun, cool place and his kid is in college somewher and he lives in Summerlin, and he is awesome. So that was cool. C: There is an old building on the corner that looks like a place that is a rooming house but has beautiful architecture? There are so many buildings here. C: It looks like maybe nuns lived there at one time. I wonder if you are thinking of what is now the Ninth Bridge School over on 9th [Street] and Bonneville [Avenue]. When we get back to the office we can look on a map. S: Who was your client for this building? At the time it was Downtown Project. I say that because at times it was Tony Hsieh, and then he created a development company. It was Downtown Project for this one. His cousin's husband, Don Welsh, this was his pet project. They were great clients. We still do some work for them, but they are not doing much. Don was amazing. He had such a vision. He came from a business-making background. Not only did he have good style and trust in us, but he knew the numbers. It was like this experiment. If we make the whole building these 10' x 10' [rooms], how do these numbers pencil out? And if we wipe them all out and make them big, like our office, how does that work, [with] a blend of food and beverage and retail and businesses? It was a great experience. So in all those ways this would be my favorite type of project. It is big but it gets to be intimate, like with Carson Kitchen, to where I actually paint and build stuff and [work with] a client who is a cool dude and still is a really good friend. S: Tell us about the mural that is on the side? 14 That was something that was done as part of the Life is Beautiful festival. It doesn't have any relationship. Figure 2: Mural on north wall of John E. Carson building, 124 S. 6th Street, Las Vegas. S: Did they get permission to do it? Yes. We love it. Our life is nice here, because we get new art every year. Isn't it gorgeous? I was coming to work and there was this guy on a big fork lift, and he had this little paint brush that was about that big and he was rolling it. I'm thinking, "Come on. It is going to take you the rest of your life to paint this building. I thought he was a painter, but then I realized he was an artist." He would paint a little bit, and he would look at his phone. I'm 15 thinking, "Boy, I would fire this guy so fast." But he was looking at his artistic work and doing just a little bit at a time. It is amazing that someone can build something that big. Our life down here is really nice. We get brand new art every year and these weeks are fun, because all the workers come in, and there is always activity, and it is exciting to see what murals we are going to get and what art. Over the weekend, this is the first year we missed it because we are doing work in Northern Nevada. We generally get these big galvanized tubs and fill them up with ice and beer, and as all our friends are going to the festival they will circulate through our office and take a break and have a beer. Then they will go on and some other friends will come in. It is a revolving door for three days. It is a place where people can put a backpack down and if they want to take a nap for twenty minutes, they have a reprieve here at our studio. S: How did you get involved with the Maryland Parkway project? It is not as exciting as you are hoping. We get a lot of invitations to bid on things. This one came across our door. I don't know if you have ever seen one of these, but they are instructions: here is the project; here are the qualifications you need; you need to respond to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 things. It is firm name, firm experience, who your project managers will be, and stuff like that. A lot of my job these days is to make sure that BunnyFish has work in the future, so we are not just waiting until one job is done to look for another one. I may sift through ten of these a week; other times it is one every two weeks, which is the range. This came to the office and I thought, hands-down we have to do this one. I have spent so much of my life between McCarran Airport and here. I spent so much of my childhood at the Boulevard Mall. I went to Ruby [S.] Thomas [Elementary School]. I was born and raised in Paradise Palms. I was born at Sunrise Hospital. The last time I saw my mom was in 16 Sunrise Hospital. Our office is here, but we are moving more towards Maryland Parkway. The RFP [Request for Proposal] was written by non-architects. I and my business partner are looking at it and we think, "What is the project?" and I say, "I don't know exactly, but we are going to get this one." If you go after a school or a fire station they would ask you what school did you go to; what is your degree; how many years have you had that degree; show us a copy of your business license. For this one we took an 11" x 17" map, and we took us and our staff, and we charted a path. We started with BunnyFish and we worked our way back down: born at Sunrise Hospital, raised in Paradise Palms; one of our architects who is key to the project has now moved to Paradise Palms; we live in John S. Park [neighborhood]. My business partner and I teach at UNLV; we went to UNLV; the staff is at UNLV, and I spent time at Boulevard Mall, Ruby Thomas, showing this path. S: Do you still have that? Yes. We can share that with you. That was our entry submission. I don't think you are going to find somebody who understands this location better than we do. We made up our minds that we were going to do it. We had two choices: one was a very business-like approach and one was an emotional approach. We chose that [the emotional approach], and we were awarded the project. C: Tell me what the project is. The project is simple. There is a lot of desire to connect [McCarran] Airport with Downtown, and UNLV with the Airport, and UNLV with Downtown. It is very smart, because what happens in places like Vegas, where it is a commuter university, people commute to Las Vegas and then they spend their four or six years here, and then they 17 commute out of there. What places like Tucson, Arizona, have done successfully, and created a model for, they have created a light rail from their university to Downtown. The course of urbanism is very simple. It is always, 100 percent of the time—and no one has been able to disprove any of this—created by the disenfranchised. The disenfranchised are the artists, the musicians, the immigrants, and a lot of time the LGBT community. These are people who have left their houses, almost 100 percent of the time have little money, but they are looking for community. The artists and the musicians, at least, are looking for cheap space. Then there starts to be coffee shops and art galleries and ethnic foods. Then the college students start to go there, and ultimately the college students graduate, and they can either move back to the suburbs with mom or move down here. Since it is cheap and has everything they want, they move in. Then it becomes cooler. Before you know it, you have priced everybody out and everybody moves on. The smart thing that Tucson did, and we are doing now, is that we want the kids, while they are in college, to come down here and go to Carson Kitchen and go to Emergency Arts. We want them to have coffee and go to the Arts District and see the art. Then when they are deciding about whether to go back to Idaho or stay here, where there is a thriving community, they will stay here. To make a long story short, there are a lot of people that want this connection and maybe one more connection, either to North Las Vegas or the Cashman Field. For the moment it is just to Downtown. I liken it to a match car race: kids have these tracks, and they have all these cars that are racing against each other. All these people are moving at very high speed and a