Las Vegas is the only town in the world whose skyline is made up neither of buildings, like New York, nor of trees, like Wilbraham, Massachusetts, but signs.

Tom Wolfe made this observation in the early 1960s while reporting on the new, car-oriented landscapes of postwar America—places where commercial display and advertising architecture dominated what people actually saw. Las Vegas, then rapidly expanding along the Strip, offered Wolfe a vivid case study: the city’s identity was communicated less by traditional urban form (streets, blocks, building mass) than by oversized neon and roadside signage designed to be read at speed. By contrasting New York’s building-defined skyline with the tree line of Wilbraham, Massachusetts, Wolfe underscores how radically different Las Vegas appeared to an East Coast sensibility and how the West’s commercial vernacular could redefine “skyline” itself.

Wolfe contrasts the conventional markers of a city’s identity—skyscrapers (New York) or a natural canopy (a New England town)—with Las Vegas’s defining feature: commercial signage. The line captures his recurring interest in how modern America manufactures meaning through surfaces, spectacle, and consumer cues. By calling signs the “skyline,” he suggests that in Las Vegas the built environment is subordinated to advertising and illusion; the city is read as a text of brands and promises rather than as architecture. The comparison also implies a cultural inversion: where other places are oriented around permanence (buildings) or nature (trees), Las Vegas is oriented around persuasion, entertainment, and the monetization of attention.