The very first minute of 1997 , as brought to you by network television , could hardly have been a more literal display of America 's pre-millennial cultural schizophrenia .New York _ the booming city of falling crime and skyrocketing tourism _ welcomed in the New Year at a moment when Times Square has rarely looked more like Las Vegas , while Las Vegas , enjoying its own boom as the nation 's fastest-growing city , worked overtime to simulate New York .Las Vegas officialdom went so far as to choose midnight New York time as zero-hour for ringing in 1997 with a display of fireworks by New York 's Grucci family , topped by the explosion of the Hacienda , an obsolete hotel .And there 's more New York to come this weekend with the opening of the most overhyped new Las Vegas hotel _ New York-New York , whose facade resembles a backlot set decorator 's Technicolor fantasy of its namesake 's skyline .Back in the real New York , New York , the giddy explosion of Vegas-style electric signage in Times Square is no accident .The new 42nd Street 's planners never hid their esthetic debt to " Learning From Las Vegas , " the landmark 1972 academic treatise in which Robert Venturi , Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour gave the billboards and neon dazzle of the Strip their architectural due .How could the entertainment centers of two cities as radically different as New York and Las Vegas aspire to twinship ? It 's a testament to the popularity of theme-park culture , which can turn any American place into a sanitized replica of any other place for our delectation .While no one misses the mobsters who once ruled the Strip or the porno lords of Times Square , the corporations that have replaced such sleazy entrepreneurs are impersonally multinational , not idiosyncratically indigenous .They can superimpose " New York-New York " or " Las Vegas " anywhere with an efficiency , speed and size that may have been beyond even Walt Disney 's imagination when he plunked down " Main Street U.S.A. " and " Frontierland " in Anaheim .On the Strip , where a $ 6-billion-plus building splurge is under way , mammoth hotels evoking " Paris " and " Venice " are yet to come .In Times Square , the Disney , Warner Brothers and Madame Tussaud 's enclaves are still in embryo .Yet already an air of unreality prevails in both cities .The fabled Glitter Gulch of Las Vegas 's old downtown , Fremont Street , is now the Fremont Street Experience _ an outdoor mall in which the sky is blocked out by metal sheathing for the nightly projection of laser-light shows .It 's as oppressively anti-urban in character as the faceless Marriott Marquis Hotel that gave bland corporate culture its first foothold in Times Square in the 80s .But urbanites shouldn't begin a new year in despair .The story is hardly over yet .New York and Las Vegas remain cities , not gated theme parks , and both the people who live in them and visit them have an unruly dynamism of their own .For all Las Vegas 's costly , much-publicized recent efforts to turn itself into a family resort , gambling still rules .The enormous amusement park built beside the MGM Grand was deserted when I visited it last spring ; now it 's going to be radically scaled back , even as other casino hotels are dropping once highly touted plans for day-care centers and other child-friendly blandishments .So all-consuming is gambling , and so intrinsic is it to Las Vegas 's identity , that the city still lacks any cultural institution to rival its strip-mall shrine to Liberace even though its population is of the same magnitude as Washington and San Francisco .Similarly , a refurbished Times Square can not in itself reverse New York 's identity : 42nd Street is still within walking distance of both rending urban squalor and the Museum of Modern Art .Yes , it was uplifting of the city to import the beloved Oseola McCarty , the philanthropic former washerwoman from Hattiesburg , Miss. , to preside over the ball-lowering Tuesday night _ though she had previously neither celebrated New Year 's Eve nor heard of Times Square .But even as this angelic symbol of the new Times Square hit town , flimflam men bearing suitcases of fake gold watches were nonetheless doing a lively business in front of a fabled relic of the old Times Square , the Palace Theater .Right under the marquee of Disney 's " Beauty and the Beast . "