Uncle Jack at VeryVintageVegas.com supplied this picture.

Just in time for the Las Vegas High Alumni to hold their all-years reunion next Saturday comes word that their alma mater has been repainted.

There is a belief that it is the original color of the building but our friends who went to school there back in the 1930s and the 1940s are calling to say the current paint job is in question.

Here's a photo of the way the school has looked for as long as any of us can remember:

Our pal Kristen Petersen over at the Las Vegas Sun tells us:

It’s not every day that you see the Las Vegas Arts District in a McDonald’s commercial.

Local ad agency Robertson Wood has changed that — at least for September — with a 30-second spot that features the Arts Factory and the Funk House as well as the Entertainment District’s Beauty Bar and Downtown Cocktail Room.

The whimsical commercial, which melds cartoons with real images, began airing this week on several local stations.

Set to an ’80s-style rock jingle, it features a multicultural cast of characters getting out of bed and heading off to the retro McDonald’s on Sahara Avenue near Las Vegas Boulevard. After a romp through Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area, they stroll past the downtown landmarks swinging a McDonald’s bag.

It closes with an overlay of the McDonald’s logo on the graffiti-style mural on the Funk House at Casino Center and Colorado Boulevard, recognizable to anyone who has traversed the epicenter of First Friday.

There are cartoon hints of the familiar Strip skyline and the Fabulous Las Vegas sign, but the focus is clearly on local cultural hot spots.

The ad agency wanted to get away from the cliche Las Vegas landmarks and cater to Las Vegas “insiders,” says Scott Robertson, president and creative director of Robertson Wood, which also is responsible for Summerlin’s “This Is Home” commercials.

“We thought we’d appeal to people emotionally, put a smile on their face, inspire them to come eat their burgers. But we didn’t want it to be the Strip,” Robertson says. “By showing hidden gems that only locals know about, that would be something that would be more resonant with people.”

It isn’t common, but McDonald’s sometimes contracts with regional agencies to give ads local flavor, company spokeswoman Blake Wynter says.

Robertson says he was drawn to downtown’s retro industrial architecture, and if the ad gives the area a boost, all the better.

The Attic, a funky vintage clothing store on South Main Street in the Arts District, got a big boost in tourist business a few years ago when it was featured in a national Visa commercial.

Two local production companies, Lola Pictures and Sun Media Productions, worked on the commercial. Lola founder Christopher Ramirez says he likes the idea of celebrating local culture.

Wes Myles, a commercial photographer and owner of the Arts Factory, is used to it. Disney recently shot a movie on Main Street. Rap groups, car clubs and other companies, including Harley-Davidson, use his property for filming.

“It’s the bohemian funky look,” Myles says. “It’s the hip thing to do these days: to show the real world. It’s not so polished, so white bread anymore.

“I think it makes downtown a little less fearful to people.”

By now most of you know that our favorite book on Las Vegas Architecture is Alan Hess's
"Viva Las Vegas: After Hours Architecture" but it's not the only one.  "Learning From Las Vegas"  was published over thirty years ago and a group of architecture students are descending upon the Strip to see what has changed since the book was published in the early 1970s.

Joe Brown writes in the Las Vegas Sun:

“Less is a bore,” proclaimed the little book about Las Vegas architecture.

When it was first published nearly 40 years ago, “Learning From Las Vegas” was called “an assault,” “a dangerous book.” Lauding the city’s “messy vitality,” it put Vegas on the architectural map and generated a healthy controversy, calling for architects to be less elitist and more receptive to the unself-conscious tastes and values of ordinary people, reversing the modernist decree that “less is more.”

The authors were architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Venturi’s wife and partner, and Steven Izenour, now deceased, writing when Las Vegas was well on its way to becoming the architectural marvel — or monstrosity — it is today.

It’s time for a new look at Las Vegas.

Next week 10 Yale University architecture students, led by Washington, D.C.-based architect David M. Schwarz, will fly in to study the Strip’s shopping areas and entertainment centers. Schwarz, who is designing the $360 million Smith Center for the Performing Arts for Las Vegas’ downtown, is calling the study “Learning in Las Vegas.” The intent is to produce another significant book on the Strip. Schwarz has been contracted by Harrah’s to master plan its Strip properties and, not coincidentally, the Yale group will use Harrah’s mile on Las Vegas Boulevard as its study case — the problem of Las Vegas.

In an architectural design studio, Schwarz says, “you give the students a problem, and they design to solve the problem. It’s pretending you are the client and they are the architect. Our design problem is for a piece of the Strip. But we’re going to spend a lot of time looking at downtown to understand the origins of Las Vegas’ architectural pattern.”

In their 1972 book, Venturi and Scott Brown summarized the 1968 research study of the Las Vegas Strip they taught at Yale’s School of Architecture and Planning. Architects and students analyzed Vegas’ unique uses of signage, space, lighting, transportation and building design to communicate and promote.

“Learning From Las Vegas” was controversial on arrival, and remains influential — it is still discussed and debated.

“It inverts the ideas that many have based their professional lives upon,” The Ohio Review said about it at the time. “It threatens those things that we use to distinguish the distance between us, the cultured, and them, the vulgar. It is difficult to accept the idea of the citizens of our ‘know-nothing culture’ knowing more about the world they live in than the trained cultural architect and their insolence in preferring it.”

The architects/authors coined the terms “duck” and “decorated shed,” concepts still used by architects.

“Ducks” are literalism in advertising, buildings whose shapes are meant to communicate the activity going on inside (named after a Long Island roadside poultry shop shaped like a duck). Think of buildings shaped like hot dogs, pyramids and cityscapes.

“Decorated sheds” are mundane structures — casinos, hotels, restaurants — with large-scale decorations, text or obvious symbols to tell a quickly moving passer-by what’s within an otherwise bland big box. Think of just about any casino-resort not among the ducks.

In the decades since Venturi and Scott Brown were here, the desert city has continued to sprawl and erupt horizontally and vertically. The gambling mecca now derives most of its revenue from nongaming ventures — shopping, dining, entertainment. There are pyramids and castles, towering electronic displays, simulacrums of Paris and Venice and New York.

“I think that book really did capture one aspect of the American-built environment,” Schwarz says. “But I don’t think it’s sufficiently judgmental. I think that many Strip centers have been built under the guise of decorated sheds. And the book doesn’t talk about having sufficient responsibility in what we build, how we build and how we make place.”

What Venturi and Scott Brown did, Schwarz says, was take a look at Las Vegas and ask, “What does the rest of the world have to learn from what’s happened in Las Vegas?”

“It occurred to me that the rest of the world has changed a lot — as has Las Vegas — in the last 40 years,” says Schwarz, who is the Davenport visiting professor at Yale. “And that it would be very interesting to take a look at what Las Vegas ought to be learning from the rest of the world. And how you would convert the past 40 years of Las Vegas, knowing what we know now from the rest of the world, into the Las Vegas of the future.”

Schwarz says he expects many fascinating questions to arise. For starters: Should open areas on the Strip be developed and how should infill projects be built? How do you facilitate pedestrian-friendly streets? What is the role of adaptive reuse, and these days, when we’re much more concerned about sustainability, is it wasteful to keep tearing buildings down and building new ones? And how does all of this fit into the ethos of the 21st century?

“There are a gazillion experts on this,” says Schwarz, noting that students will meet with Boyd Gaming kingpin Bill Boyd, MGM Mirage’s Alan Feldman, and Harrah’s chief executive, Gary Loveman, and vice chairman, Charles Atwood, who will give a talk called “Follow the Money: Sex, Greed and Architecture in Las Vegas.” Students will visit Venturi and Scott Brown in Philadelphia.

And, of course, they’ll see the Cher and Cirque shows.

This is the old 5th Street School on Las Vegas Blvd at Lewis.  I went to Kindergarten here.  In the right hand corner of the picture you can see a rounded room with windows.  That was the Kindergarten Room.  My mother enrolled me in September 1962 and Miss Tucker was the teacher.  She was almost 6 feet tall and thin as a rail.  She was likely what they called an old maid back then but I didn't care.  I thought she was wonderful.  She taught us more than just our ABCs, she taught us to ask questions, to read and to have fun.  Every day there were cookies and milk and nap time with our little pieces of carpet.  In May, we got to dress up in western wear for the Helldorado celebration.

This was actually the third Grammar school.  The first two burned.  The first one was built in 1908 and burned in 1910.  The cornerstone for the second (at this location) was laid in 1910 and the school opened in 1911.  Students from around the Valley were invited to attend.  Those who lived outside of town boarded with local families for the school year.  The second school burned down in 1935 and this school was built.

It remained a school until the late 1960s when the school was closed and the space was used as government offices and a Metro substation.

However, today it is undergoing a $13.4 million dollar restoration by the City of Las Vegas.  From Uncle Jack at www.veryvintagevegas.com:

More than $13.4 million in funding for this building’s transformation was provided by the Redevelopment Agency.

Billed as a “cultural oasis” in the midst of downtown Las Vegas’ office and legal corridors, the revitalized building will be home to an assortment of local arts and architectural organizations. The primary tenants are the University of Nevada Las Vegas Fine Arts Program, including the Downtown Design Center for the School of Architecture; the Nevada School of the Arts (a music education organization); the American Institute of Architects; and the city of Las Vegas Cultural Affairs Division.

Many of the common areas of the Historic Fifth Street School will be available for public or private functions. These areas include a multi-purpose performance area/auditorium capable of accommodating up to 400 people, a gallery space for exhibitions and smaller meetings able to hold up to 200 people and a 30-person conference room. In addition, there will also be open courtyards available for outside activities, as well as the 16,000-square-foot Centennial Plaza that can be used for outdoor gatherings.

There is a rededication ceremony on Monday, Sept. 22nd.  Alumni are invited to attend beginning at 4:30 with the dedication ceremony following at 5:30 pm.

I hope to see you there!

Well here is the cover of the book that Allen Sandquist, Carey Burke and I have been working on.  It's a history of Las Vegas as seen through postcards.  It includes chapters on the Early Days of Las Vegas, the community buildings, Fremont Street Post-War, Roadside Architecture and the Las Vegas Strip.

We have included a number of rare and seldom seen postcards as well.

The book will be published by Arcadia Publishing and should be in bookstores later this winter.