Then he strode out of the darkness and jumped up on the Art Deco battlements. The story goes that even now, close to a century later, the concrete at the core hasn’t set.) Davis left his entrance to the very last minute we couldn’t hear a car arriving. (The engineers in 1933 had to dream up new ways of cooling the mixture inside the superheated pyramid, running a network of water pipes right through it. We were there a dozen of us almost alone in the desert silence, looking down over the face of the dam to the turbine halls seven hundred feet below. Be on top of the dam, near one of the central towers, on Friday before midnight.’ It had been a lonely triumph for trade unionism in the previous decade. He was doubtful, for reasons easily guessed he only began to soften when he heard that part of our time in the city would be spent with the men and women who had helped unionise the workforce of its monster hotels. (‘ Boulder, not Hoover,’ I hear him growling.) The geographer Richard Walker and I had been teaching a seminar at Berkeley on ‘consumer society’ and we were ending term with a field trip to Vegas, and wanted Davis to meet us there. One of mine is of midnight on the Boulder Dam, out in the desert south of Las Vegas. M ike Davis was the kind of character who left you with strong, comic memories.
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