ITHIN months of the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, the global surge of sympathy for the United States began to ebb. Before the invasion of Iraq, London’s Sunday Times reported that equal numbers of Britons ranked Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush as the top threat to world peace. In France, a book claiming that Washington itself had sponsored the 9/11 attacks became a huge best seller, and in Germany a full 20 percent of the population endorsed this view.

Three years and two wars later, attitudes toward America have hardened still further. A worldwide poll taken last March found that the United States’ favorability ratings have fallen to critical levels, dropping precipitously in most West European countries and to 5 percent in Jordan. Meanwhile, in October, a columnist in The Guardian mused on the coming presidential election, ”John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr. — where are you now?”

When a columnist for a leading newspaper of a leading American ally seems openly to call for the assassination of a sitting president (the day after the election, Britain’s Daily Mirror ran the headline, ”How Can 59,054,087 People Be So Dumb?”), it’s time to start worrying.

Of late, a whole shelf of books has been published attempting to explain why people hate America so much. These works fall roughly into two categories: left-wing attacks on the United States, and attacks from the right on those who attack it. Think of the first group as the anti-Americans, and the second as the anti-anti-Americans. Just about all these two factions can agree on is that anti-Americanism, in one form or another, is almost as old as the country itself — and that it has recently grown a lot worse.

Consider first the views of the antis. Americans — as the Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier recently suggested in his inventive but maddening movie ”Dogville” — are, by turns, materialistic, ignorant, rapacious and brutal. Arundhati Roy, the Indian author of one good novel and many peevish essays, complains in her strident broadside, ”An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire,” that the United States suffers from a ”self-destructive impulse toward supremacy, stranglehold, global hegemony” and is led by a genocidal coward who manipulates a craven press to do his bidding.

In less hysterical terms, the Washington-based British scholar Anatol Lieven laments (in his well-written and well-researched ”America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism”) that Americans are excessively religious and nationalistic; worse, they seem determined to inflict their Old Testament values on the rest of the world. It’s the ”self-congratulatory guff” of this civilizational mission (in the words of Will Hutton, another British writer and the author of the cranky ”Declaration of Interdependence: Why America Should Join the World”) that drives many of the anti-Americans around the bend; if only the United States would act more like other countries — especially those in kinder, gentler, more cosmopolitan Europe, Hutton says — much of the resentment would dissipate.

There is something to such arguments, at least the more moderate ones. It’s not hard to see why the puritanical moralism of the United States and its vigorous pursuit of self-interest rubs both secular Europeans and impoverished Muslims the wrong way.

The problem with the anti-Americans’ complaints, however, is that they are often undermined by bad faith. Some of the critics have never even bothered to visit the United States. And even those who have (like Hutton) or who live here (like Lieven) frequently sound as though they haven’t and don’t. When Hutton fulminates that national democracy in the United States has descended to the level of ”pre-Enlightenment Europe,” it becomes hard to take the rest of his charges seriously. And Lieven undermines his otherwise lucid writing when he insists that there is little tolerance for dissent in American public discourse. Has he not seen ”Fahrenheit 9/11” or visited a newsstand lately? The venom and inaccuracy of such charges suggest that the anti-Americans are motivated by something more basic than disagreements over policy or the personality of a particular president.

Also disturbing is the way many of these writers emphasize America’s relationship with Israel. There’s nothing wrong with complaining about Washington’s strategy in the Middle East; reasonable people can disagree. But one should be skeptical of a writer like Lieven who refers to the pro-Israel lobby as having an ”iron grip” on Washington or who labels a contemporary pro-Israeli Lebanese-American writer an ”Arab Josephus” — a comparison (to Flavius Josephus, the Hellenized Jewish historian of the ancient world often known for his cowardice and treachery) that manages to combine several layers of racial condescension in two words. Such language is not new; anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism have run together at least since the 1930′s, when French writers denounced the avaricious United States as ”Uncle Shylock.” But the modern anti-Americans would serve themselves better by taking care to untangle the two.

Enter the anti-antis, who seize on these faults to mount a spirited counteroffensive. Three new books lead the charge: ”Hating America,” a richly detailed if pedestrian chronicle of anti-Americanism through the ages by Barry and Judith Colp Rubin (two conservative Middle East experts); ”Understanding Anti-Americanism: Its Origins and Impact at Home and Abroad,” a collection of polemical essays examining the phenomenon around the world, edited and introduced by Paul Hollander (a professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Massachusetts and himself the author of a book entitled ”Anti-Americanism”); and, the most idiosyncratic of the three, the wildly discursive and undisciplined ”Anti-Americanism,” by Jean-Francois Revel, a rare pro-American member of the French Establishment, who fills in the picture from Paris.

The three books are united by rage at America’s enemies — with a venom that mirrors the anti-Americans’ own. In none of them, however, has the excess of spleen produced clarity, fair-mindedness or nuance.

The anti-antis reject their opposites’ claim that the problem with America is its behavior or its president. Instead, they argue, America-bashing derives from more fundamental sources: the resentment of once-great societies eclipsed by Yankee upstarts, and of those unable to participate in America’s bounty. As Revel writes, much of European ”anti-Americanism stems fundamentally from our continent’s loss during the 20th century of its 600-year leadership role”; Bernard Lewis, writing about the Arab world, has made virtually the same claim. In Revel’s terms, ”the principal function of anti-Americanism has always been, and still is, to discredit liberalism by discrediting its supreme incarnation,” an argument that echoes President Bush’s line that ”so long as we hold dear to our freedoms, the enemy will hate us, because they hate freedom.” Or as Hollander puts it, ”The deepest and broadest source of anti-Americanism . . . is the aversion to (or, at best, ambivalence about) modernity, which the United States most strikingly represents.” Add to this a few other ingredients — ”a romantic as well as Marxist anti-capitalism . . . the personal and cultural problems peculiar to intellectuals; the specter of standardization and homogenization associated with the spread of American mass culture” — and the picture starts to seem complete.

Anti-Americanism, in this view, also proves useful for covering up one’s own shortcomings. French intellectuals, Revel says, focus on despising America so they can ignore their own blunders and console themselves for their loss of linguistic, cultural and political influence. Similarly, as Salman Rushdie wrote in 2002, Arab leaders use the United States as ”a smoke screen for Muslim nations’ many defects — their corruption, their incompetence, their oppression of their own citizens, their economic, scientific and cultural stagnation.” Bashing Washington, the Rubins argue, is a convenient way for despotic and incompetent regimes to distract their subjects from the real source of their problems: the regimes themselves.

Several of these points, like many of those made by the anti-Americans, ring true. If hatred of the United States is rational, why has it persisted for so many years in the face of different kinds of American behavior? As Revel says, the hallmark of fanaticism is ”the way it seizes on a certain behavior of the hated object and sweepingly condemns it, only to condemn with equal fervor the opposite behavior shortly after — or even simultaneously.” And, indeed, at various times, the United States has been roundly attacked — often by the same people, and in similar language — for being both too engaged in the world and not engaged enough. Anti-American Islamists almost always ignore recent United States action on behalf of Muslims in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia and elsewhere.

That said, it beggars belief to argue, as these writers do, that anti-Americanism stems solely from the neuroses of its proponents, that there’s no link at all between America-bashing and George W. Bush. How else to explain the unparalleled current intensity?

Like the anti-Americans, moreover, the anti-antis make their own mistakes in describing American society. Revel is so adamant about rebutting every French criticism of the United States that he mischaracterizes the country as profoundly as do Lieven or Hutton. This forces him into some bizarre contortions. He claims, for example, that there was nothing even slightly fishy about the 2000 presidential election, and that it’s just as easy to get guns in Europe as in America (ignoring the point that Europeans seem to use them less). The Rubins, similarly, manage to discuss anti-Americanism in Chile without an examination of Washington’s support for the 1973 coup there, an egregious and telling omission.

Even more disturbing is what the anti-antis advise for United States policy. Roger Kimball (the managing editor of The New Criterion magazine and a contributor to Hollander’s book) insists that since anti-Americanism has nothing to do with American behavior, there’s no reason to change that behavior. On the contrary, Kimball says, we must stay the course, for ”the current orgy of anti-Americanism, fanned by the war with Iraq, will dissipate in proportion to the resoluteness demonstrated by the United States.” Not only is this unlikely; a damn-the-torpedoes approach of this sort would also be disastrous after three years of blunders in Iraq and elsewhere.

So, finally, which side is right? Do they hate us for what we do or for what we are? Or for what they are? Once one has sorted through the careless polemics in both camps, the unsatisfying answer seems to be that neither side is right (entirely) or that both are right (in part). Roy, Lieven and Hutton exaggerate the United States’ flaws and underplay the way the country gets damned for whatever it does. Revel, the Rubins and Hollander & Company minimize the country’s very real problems and misdeeds.

Meanwhile, the Nov. 2 elections haven’t helped clarify matters. When voters endorsed Bush for a second term, the difference between anti-Bushism and anti-Americanism abroad became harder to distinguish. That’s not to say, however, that a Kerry victory would have resolved this question either. There’s little doubt that Kerry would have turned a more conciliatory (even French-speaking) face to the world. If, as many anti-Americans insist, they are really only Bush-haters, the change in style could have mollified them; and it certainly would have deprived them of some ammunition. But on substance — the future of Iraq, the Kyoto Protocols, the International Criminal Court, etc. — Kerry’s foreign policy would probably not have been much different from Bush’s. Given the pressures on America abroad and the demands of the public at home, especially since 9/11 and the Iraq war, a modern president (whether Republican or Democratic) would have little leeway in foreign affairs.

What this suggests is that the distinction between what the United States does and what it is may actually be less clear — and less helpful — than many of the anti-Americans imply. There is no point in wishing, as Hutton does, that the United States would suddenly start acting in a more ”European” fashion.

Which leads to a gloomy conclusion. A more conciliatory American tone in the years ahead might quiet the country’s critics somewhat. But nothing Washington could realistically do would be likely to change the minds of those determined, for their own reasons, to hate it. Anti-Americanism is something we’re stuck with for at least as long as America remains pre-eminent. Perhaps the most Americans can hope for is that the animosity won’t intensify any time soon. But if it doesn’t, that’s probably only because, as all these books agree, it couldn’t get much worse.

Jonathan Tepperman is senior editor of Foreign Affairs.

EVER mind that the almost shockingly big Museum of Modern Art, which opens tomorrow, could hardly have been other than an improvement on the previous expansion, 20 years ago, which was a rats’ maze of galleries around an escalator. By and large the redone museum, although more than a trifle like the new corporate headquarters of modernism, is a triumph of formal restraint and practical design – an eloquent reaffirmation, within its galleries, of the enduring beauty of the Modern’s historic, albeit tendentious, account of modernism.

There are big problems with the museum. But you would have to be either comatose or completely immune to the pleasures of modernism not to be moved by its fifth floor, the start of the rooms for painting and sculpture. Here is the familiar, early story of modernism that the Modern virtually invented under its founding director and genius, Alfred H. Barr Jr., and elaborated on, brilliantly, under William Rubin and Kirk Varnedoe. The story is now retold in an installation, overseen by the curator John Elderfield, that is about as ravishing as any sequence of galleries in any new museum I can recall.

This re-hang, like the architecture by Yoshio Taniguchi, pays homage to what has always made the Modern the Modern, tweaking, rather than overturning, the past. Yes, the rooms are larger, starker and less human scale; yes, there have been some changes to what’s on view, and yes, reactionaries will inevitably carp and declare the end of the world as we know it. But the Modern, after experimenting with alternative, thematic ways to present its classic modernist paintings and sculptures in a series of awful shows four years ago, has largely gone back to its roots, and what results is a gift.

The new suites of galleries for prints, drawings, photographs and design, I should add, make a virtual museum within the museum. The opening show of prints is a sublime survey of the medium to the present. Drawings are packed like sardines in the galleries, but they are some of the greatest works of early 20th-century art. Photographs skew to the present, racing up to 1960, a little swiftly, with the obvious names and some new ones.

“Have you seen it?” people clearly want to know. Obviously the Modern matters deeply, to the city, to our psyche. It is part of our identity. We have missed it. We’re reminded by the reopening, lest we have become too complacent or grouchy, that its core historic collections are indispensable to our shared cultural legacy, representing to the rest of the world not just American wealth and power but also our most progressive dreams. The place, declining to dumb down, speaks to the aspirations of our society to be modern.

That said, the Modern has become so embedded in the minds of New Yorkers, that it is a virtual Rorschach of conflicting desires. I wrote “by and large” earlier because I can’t help finding it infinitely sad that the museum, which many New Yorkers, not all of them art buffs, fondly recall from decades ago as an intimate and congenial place to commune with the gods of modern art and to pass an idle hour or two in its garden, our urban Eden, has now become, like so much of the rest of our culture, grandiose.

Everything comes at a price these days. At the Modern that price is $20 per ticket, an appalling and cynical figure. Unfortunately, this will set the standard for other museums, with the obvious consequences for a broad public. The comparison is not to for-profit Broadway or Disneyland. A museum is an educational institution. In 1939, admission to the Modern was 25 cents. Adjusted for inflation, that would be around $3.50 today, which I suspect is still shy of the price of a cappuccino in the cafe now crudely plunked directly opposite the entrance to the fifth- floor galleries, guaranteeing that the first sights of the museum’s glorious Cézannes and van Goghs will be accompanied by the ching of cash registers.

Notwithstanding the considerable intelligence and grace that Mr. Taniguchi has brought to the design of the galleries, the main public space is also a chilly box. It’s easy to predict the din and to foresee the mobs of people roaming across what the museum is daintily calling the building’s “piano nobile,” a kind of second-floor lobby below the soaring atrium, adjacent to a bookstore and aspiring to be a kind of town square, where Barnett Newman’s “Broken Obelisk,” a work perilously close to kitsch, stands before Monet’s “Water Lilies” and a few other otherwise excellent pictures, now dwarfed in the vastness.

You either like atriums or you don’t, in the same way that you either do or don’t like hotel lobbies and airports. After visiting the museum several times, I have grown gradually more accustomed to this one, without yet feeling the intended spiritual uplift and communal cheer that others seem to.

Elsewhere, within its restrictive agenda for a large midblock expansion, the Modern has faced down the sirens of architectural fashion by building a building whose galleries are so clean, calm and self-effacing that they are ruthless. I mean that the rooms, with their walls that seem almost to float, force the art on view to speak for itself, which sets the bar very high. Another way to put it is to say that the architecture, the atrium excepted, hides nothing.

There are now amazing moments as a result: standing near the corner in the gallery of early Cubism, there’s a view that takes in Picasso’s “Bather” (1909), his standing nude (1906), another Picasso of two nudes (1906), his “Demoiselles d’Avignon” and Boccioni’s Futurist sculpture of a dissolving figure a couple of galleries away.

A suite of Brancusis (a room of Brancusis used to be a kind of dead end in the old museum, a resting point) now marks a crossroads within the fifth-floor galleries, with Miró, Duchamp and Mondrian left, right and center – it’s up to you to choose which direction to take. The installation allows visitors to make connections among familiar artists, and so to see modernism in ways that can recall Barr’s famous graph of history, with its spaghetti entanglement of -isms and arrows.

Let’s hope the new Modern gives other museums pause before they sign up yet another big-name architect to build a building that tussles with art to call attention to itself. Mr. Taniguchi solved the problem of designing an immense museum by trying to make it disappear. Picasso, Matisse, Mondrian and Bonnard, not Mr. Taniguchi, are still the stars here, to Mr. Taniguchi’s credit.

And in rooms designed to suit the formal account of artistic progress and cross-pollination that is the Modern’s old mantra, the collection moves seamlessly from the 1880′s and Cézanne in one direction off to “Demoiselles d’Avignon.” In another direction, it heads toward Expressionism, after which comes a room of Matisses (talk about Eden). That is succeeded by a mélange of 1920′s art, pairing Matisse and Picasso, with yet more branches into rooms for Constructivism and Dada, Mondrian and Surrealism.

I could imagine a few more resting spots, places at which to look at a single picture with nothing else in one’s field of vision. I remember what it used to be like at the museum, pre-1984, to encounter “Water Lilies” as if in its own chapel, or “Guernica” looming in a room off the top of the stairs, immense and engulfing.

What worked then in parlor-size rooms for a modest audience is, alas, impossible in a building designed to accommodate millions of visitors, but people still want, and need, to feel themselves immersed in a painting, to commune with art in peace, in private – or at least to have the illusions of peace and privacy: they want to lose themselves, psychologically speaking, in the work.

The present layout avoids the tiresome progression of rooms in the last expansion that by necessity betrayed both chronology and the messiness of how art really happens. There’s now space for new names and some serendipity. Diego Rivera, in his Cubist phase, is mixed in among the Cubists. Van Gogh’s portrait of the postman Joseph Roulin (an acquisition made under Mr. Elderfield’s predecessor, Varnedoe, to whom the painting’s conspicuous placement is an implicit homage) is tucked around the corner from Signac’s cheeky portrait of the art critic Félix Fénéon, replacing Cézanne’s male “Bather,” which had become a kind of poster boy, as the opening salvo. The rearrangement lets you look afresh at “The Bather,” which now hangs nearby with other Cézannes.

Less successful is the fourth floor. It picks up the history of painting and sculpture from 1940 to 1970 with American art, rather than, as in the past, with Giacometti and Dubuffet, who now share the next room with a wider range of artists than used to represent the postwar era. The Modern pretty much ran out of space in its permanent galleries shortly after the galleries for Pollock and the Abstract Expressionists. A couple of small rooms sufficed for the 1960′s.

Now there is space dedicated to Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, to Pop, Minimalism and Post-Minimalism. Artists who had rarely, if ever, been shown are present – Armando Reverón, Yayoi Kusama, Norman Lewis, Romare Bearden, Howard Hodgkin, Richard Diebenkorn, Lee Bontecou, Alejandro Otero. Reshuffling the deck permits some new, interesting linkages: Bridget Riley with Sol LeWitt; Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark with Robert Smithson and Eva Hesse.

But there are also drawbacks. The Abstract Expressionist galleries seem somehow less momentous than they used to, less a culmination than a passageway. The closer to the art of the present the installation gets, the more it breaks down. Despite the clever juxtapositions, the sculptor Donald Judd was right years ago when he complained that the Chinese menu style of museum installation clashes with the spirit of the art he and others of his generation made.

The Modern is clearly still not sure what to make of the art of the last 30 or 40 years – what its role and mission, as well as its taste and judgment, are in an art world that has changed and expanded. Innumerable institutions not wielding its clout but not freighted with its history have come along and outflanked it.

As further proof, the new galleries for art since 1970 in Mr. Taniguchi’s building are a disappointment: a suite of gigantic double-height rooms on the second floor, physically and conceptually prominent, declaring the Modern’s intent to seem current, but also separated from the art of the past on the upper floors. The space feels lofty and utterly sterile, like a bloodless purgatory for work that hasn’t yet earned the right to ascend to the pantheon.

Divided by decade, the galleries are sparsely scattered with eclectic sculptures, paintings, photographs and drawings that look washed ashore – the costly remains from a sea of curatorial indecision. Here’s a Gordon Matta-Clark, there’s a Cindy Sherman, there’s a Robert Gober, there’s a Matthew Barney, there’s a Gerhard Richter, there’s a Vito Acconci. Some great stuff and all big names, canceling each other out.

The museum will no doubt learn how better to use this space. But 30 years of art will become 40, then 50. How will the museum ever incorporate the recent past into history? Will it just keep expanding? What, in the end, does it stand for?

Success has raised expectations about the Modern’s ability to legislate quality. Almost from the museum’s creation, people have complained about the Modern’s failure to make sense of the now, to clarify what had seemed, in each moment, a muddle. For the first 40 years of its existence the museum managed well. In the current print and design galleries, you might almost think it still does.

But the Modern is a congenitally cautious institution. It opened in 1929 with a survey of Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat and van Gogh. By 1929, Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat and van Gogh were long dead; it would be like opening a contemporary museum today with a show about Abstract Expressionism or Pop. During the next decades, a steady flow of landmark exhibitions presented Cubism, Dada and Surrealism years after they had been invented.

When Barr talked about a modern museum he meant a museum that remained in touch with the present but that also rethought and refined the past in terms of the present. To him, modern meant progressive. He preferred the word modern to “contemporary” because contemporary was too inclusive, too voguish. The Modern was slow to embrace Abstract Expressionism. There are no Julian Schnabels or Damien Hirsts now in the collection of paintings and sculpture.

It is a cliché to talk about museums today as cathedrals, and of the Modern as the cathedral of modernism, with its evangelical mission to spread the gospel to its visiting pilgrims, its white box galleries conveying a cleansing spirit, the aura of baptismal refreshment.

But of course the Modern is not a cathedral. It is the custodian of orthodox modernism, and now also a huge bento box of shops, restaurants, cafes, movie theaters, a garden and other diversions, along with art, to justify as a full day’s excursion the egregious ticket price.

Moving expansively into the future this way, it still has to figure out the present.

HO needs a $1,000-a-night suite at the Bellagio, Carl Falcone wondered, when you can lounge in your own 3,000-square-foot penthouse on the Las Vegas Strip, complete with 24-hour concierge, a chauffeured limousine and your own custom-designed bed?

And if that weren’t enough, Dr. Falcone, a 49-year-old physician from Omaha, led a visitor to his terrace, 34 stories above the din of slot machines and strobing neon. As the sun dipped below the half-scale Eiffel Tower on a recent Tuesday night, the Strip sparkled like a gold necklace studded with gem-encrusted casinos, remote but also conveniently close. “See this?” he asked. “We can go out anytime we want.”

In the biggest trend to hit Las Vegas since the megaresort casino, a forest of high-rise condominiums is sprouting up and down the Strip, bringing Viking stovetops and Sub-Zero fridges to a boulevard once limited to all-you-can-eat buffets and room-service trolleys. And gambling is rarely the draw. “The restaurants are excellent, and there’s a very active nightlife,” said Dr. Falcone, who is partial to Studio 54 at the MGM Grand on weekends. “As you live here, gambling is something you don’t even think about.”

Some 30 condo projects have been proposed along the Strip corridor, some as tall as 73 stories, threatening to overpower the Stratosphere Tower and redraw the casino-built skyline with privately owned aeries.

Early sales indicate that about half the condo units have been bought as vacation homes, many by snowbirds like Dr. Falcone and his wife, Lezlie, who wanted a milder climate for the winter, but found the enclaves of Florida and Arizona too anemic for their young-at-heart lifestyle.

TO some people, owning a pricey home smack in the middle of the world’s largest casino district sounds a bit bizarre. “When I first heard about the condos going up, I scratched my head and wondered why people would want to live there,” said Bill Eadington, an economics professor at the University of Nevada, Reno and director of its Institute for the Study of Gambling and Commercial Gaming. “It’s not a long-term environment. People stay here for three to four days. It’s a fantasy land like Disney World, and who wants to live in Disney World?”

Apparently, many people do want to live in Las Vegas. It has, they note, evolved far beyond gambling and showgirls, to include fine restaurants, high-end shopping and even touches of high-brow culture. Locals are calling it the Manhattanization of Las Vegas. But a more fitting term may be the South Beachification of the Strip.

“The Strip is our beach,” said Andrew Sasson, 34, a former nightclub bouncer from South Beach turned entrepreneur, who is developing the Panorama Towers, a twin-tower, 33-story glass complex behind the Bellagio. “In Miami, you want the oceanfront. In Vegas, you want access to the Strip, proximity to the Strip and, of course, a view of the Strip.”

And like Miami, Las Vegas is attracting the affluent young — the glitterati from Hollywood, the whiz kids from Silicon Valley, the wheeler-dealers from Wall Street — with its night life. Sure, the MTV “Real World” Suite at the Palms Casino Hotel is nice, but how about your own permanent party pad? The thought seems to have occurred to Leonardo DiCaprio, who recently bought two adjacent units on the 26th floor of the Panorama for $1.5 million, and plans to combine them into a 3,300-square-foot perch. Construction of the building is expected to begin in February.

“This is where the action is,” said Carlos Gutierrez, 35, a future neighbor of Mr. DiCaprio and a radio marketer from San Diego. He was having cocktails at the members-only Foundation Room at Mandalay Bay with two young women he had recently met. “It’s just a really hip vibe. Also, how cool would it be to have a place where I can invite my buddies or my girlfriends?”

Developers on the Strip credit the start of the high-rise explosion to Turnberry Place, three nondescript 40-story condo buildings that opened in 2001 near the north end of the Strip on Paradise Road. The project was met with deep skepticism, but that evaporated when half the first tower’s 184 units sold in 30 days to people like the Falcones, at prices from $400,000 to $4.5 million. An untapped jackpot had been struck.

“Las Vegas had nothing for second-home owners,” said Jeffrey Soffer, the principal at Turnberry Associates, a developer based in Florida best known for transforming a swamp near Miami into the planned city of Aventura. Mr. Soffer is now building a fourth tower at Turnberry Place, bringing the total number of residences to 800. Only 20 remain to be sold. “We’re not just selling an apartment; we’re selling a lifestyle,” he said.

That lifestyle apparently entitles you to an imposing wrought-iron security gate, Jacuzzis, Gaggenau dishwashers and floor-to-ceiling glass walls that open to balconies with panoramic views. Then there are the perks not found in your typical vacation home: a 24-hour valet and concierge who can round up last-minute dinner reservations, a business center with on-call secretaries, and an 80,000-square-foot clubhouse, styled in the image of a Mediterranean villa, with three restaurants, a swimming pool, a hair salon, gym and 14 massage rooms.

“It’s the best thing I’ve ever bought in my life,” said Danny Yerushalmi, 70, a clothing retailer from Roslyn Heights, N.Y., who has a two-bedroom apartment on the 18th floor, sparsely decorated with black leather couches and a glass dinner table. A frequent visitor to Las Vegas, he used to hop from the Bellagio to the Aladdin and back. “Now it’s just one call to the concierge,” he said, “and a limo picks us up at the airport.”

Like any get-rich idea in Las Vegas, the condo formula has spread like the latest poker tip. All along the Strip, billboards promoting the newest in high-rise living seem to be going up wherever an empty parcel sits. Most are followed by million-dollar showrooms, outfitted with numbingly homogeneous displays of granite countertops, stainless-steel appliances, gold faucets and pearly marble baths.

There are the Panorama, Metropolis, Sky Las Vegas, Aqua Blue, Krystal Sands, Vegas Grand and Liberty Towers, to name a few. Real estate agents are having a hard time keeping track. Even Donald J. Trump is getting into the act with a 64-story condominium hotel proposed for a parking lot behind the New Frontier Hotel and Gaming Hall. “I’m doing the tallest building in Las Vegas,” said Mr. Trump, never one to shy away from superlatives. He plans to start sales this month. “I don’t think we’ll need to do any promotion. The name Trump is very hot right now.”

To date, however, only two condominium complexes are actually up: the Turnberry and Park Towers, a pair of 20-story buildings two blocks east of the Strip on Hughes Center Drive. The Metropolis, which overlooks the old Desert Inn golf course, recently topped out at 20 stories and expects to open next summer. Ground has yet to be broken for any of the others. By one estimate, more than 20,000 condo units have been proposed, from cozy one-bedrooms at $200,000 to palatial penthouses starting at $3 million. Some observers are wondering if developers aren’t betting the farm.

“I suspect that the majority will not pass the test for success,” said Irvin Molasky, a longtime local developer who built Park Towers with the backing of Steve Wynn, the Las Vegas impresario. “The market will probably support 2,000 to 3,000 units.”

Even so, that would give rise to as many as a dozen condo towers, and more could come if the Strip continues its frenetic transformation. Sin City, after all, has outgrown its nickname and, in style and sophistication, is increasingly lumped with New York, Los Angeles and Miami.

The $9.99 buffet has been replaced by star chefs and $60 hamburgers. Souvenir shops like Bonanza are being priced out by Neiman Marcus and Harry Winston. Serious art hangs on casino walls, and the number of theatrical productions rivals Broadway’s; “Avenue Q” is skipping the national circuit to go to Las Vegas, and one London West End musical even bypassed Times Square to open there. Meanwhile, celebrities like Britney Spears and Colin Farrell are flocking to Las Vegas nightclubs at levels not seen since the days of the Rat Pack.

Any doubts about the vertical boom were erased last month when MGM Mirage, which owns 11 casinos, announced its own condominium plans. Before, high-rise proposals had all been hatched by smaller, private companies. Under the MGM Mirage $4 billion master plan, some 1,650 luxury condos will be built in the heart of the Strip, between the Bellagio and Monte Carlo hotels. It is a new direction for a corporation built on slot machines.

“What we want is an urban environment with pedestrian walkways and residences on top of retail shops and restaurants,” said Alan Feldman, a spokesman for MGM Mirage. The 66-acre site, he noted, is roughly the size of Times Square, Rockefeller Center and SoHo combined “Before, you were either a residential builder or in the gaming industry,” he said. “There was no overlap. That has all changed. This is being defined as a real estate investment rather than a gaming investment.”

Las Vegas experts are already calling this a pivotal moment in the city’s history. “This is the next big step in how Las Vegas evolves,” said Mr. Eadington, the economics professor. “My guess is that it’s going to be a very successful gamble.”

But gambling, of course, is no longer the sole reason for visiting Las Vegas. “The restaurants, the shows, the nightlife, the people watching — that’s why I go there,” said Don Roden, 58, a retired pharmaceutical executive who has a farmhouse in Virginia, a pied-à-terre in Greenwich Village and now a sumptuously furnished condominium at Park Towers. “There is a certain electricity there you won’t find anywhere else.”