Quietly (for Las Vegas), the most changeable of cities has begun to treasure the past—From its own historic neon to gauguin's Bathers. Eric Gibson finds the real riches in this desert chameleon

In Las Vegas, old neon doesn't fade away, it goes into a museum. So far, that "museum" consists of ten signs restored and installed along Fremont Street, their rust scrubbed off and dents hammered out, tubes replaced and artwork restored to its see-it-for-blocks definition—Las Vegas's indigenous art form granted a second life, casting its cool, syncopated glow over one corner of the city's storied Strip.

The most visible of these signs is the Hacienda Hotel's horse and rider, a vaquero waving from the saddle of his rearing steed. Originally in front of the now-defunct hotel, it's at the intersection of Fremont and the Strip, looming over visitors from both north and south, a forty-foot sign atop a twenty-four-foot pole. It is a symbol of the expansive welcome of tourists, of the city's nineteenth-century roots as a frontier town, and of neon signage itself, which these days is rapidly being outstripped by electronic billboards and LEDs.

One of these new high-tech wonders is the Fremont Street Experience, a four-block stretch of hotels and casinos where the street is closed to all but foot traffic and is canopied over with a ninety-foot-high electronic barrel vault covered with two million colored lightbulbs—the Sistine ceiling of Vegas. The rest of the restored neon can be found along this promenade, including one sign from the 1966 Aladdin's Lamp and another from the 1940 Chief Hotel Court featuring a logo of a Native American in full headdress.

But there's something bigger in the offing. The Fremont Street restorations are really a kind of beachhead for a Neon Museum that is building permanent quarters on a two-acre site six blocks north. When finished, it will be the repository of such historic signs as the Silver Slipper from that defunct casino; another, later Aladdin's Lamp; a 1950s Golden Nugget; and much, much more. The first phase—a facility combining exhibition space, a library, archives, offices, and, of course, a store—is scheduled to open sometime next year. Another larger, multipurpose building will follow. Finally, there are plans to devote half an acre to the celebrated Boneyard, the gravel lot next to the Young Electric Sign Company (YESCO) that was the original dumping ground for this city's burned-out cases—the inanimate ones, anyway.

From dumping ground to "museum." Welcome to Las Vegas.

In Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer maria Rilke expressed his dislike of Rome, disparaging what he called "the abundance of its pasts," the accumulated layers of history and civilization: Etruscan, Roman, Renaissance, Baroque—each built upon and enriched by the ruins of the last. The idea was heretical. Rome had been a cultural pilgrimage point for centuries, the place where aspiring artists went to master their craft by steeping themselves in its probity and traditions. The idea still seems slightly scandalous today.

Only an addled gambler stumbling back to his sixty-nine-dollar room at Bally's could confuse Vegas with Rome, but the city is definitely racking up an accumulation of pasts, all recent—roughly one new incarnation per decade. In a place so dedicated to the new, the now, and the ephemeral, every attraction, from lowly neon vaqueros to lofty casino hotels, is dumped at the first sign of obsolescence, if not before. The wrecking balls are ever-busy. The Aladdin has had four incarnations in its forty-year history, and the new routinely emerges without any nod to the old. There's nothing to tell you that what is now the Venetian was once the den of the Rat Pack, or that the vaquero is waving toward the Mandalay Bay, which replaced the Hacienda in 1999.