LAS VEGAS -- This city's monument to the economic recession sits at the corner of Las Vegas Boulevard and Desert Inn Road, where idle cranes hover above a stark honeycomb of bare concrete. It was to be Las Vegas' latest playpen for the ultra-rich, the $8 billion, 5,000-room Echelon hotel and casino, a structure complete with fountains and gleaming glass towers bearing fanciful names like Delano and Shangri-La.

But in August, with those towers having reached only 12 of their planned 55 stories, the money ran out. Construction won't resume until next year at the earliest. For now it sits, surrounded by orange jersey barriers and a chain-link construction fence, just another stalled building project in a recession-stricken metropolis that Forbes magazine recently called the "most abandoned" city in America.

The bright neon lights are still here, and the jingling sounds of slot machines still emanate from the casinos, and tourists still troll the Strip with adult beverages in hand. But behind it all, Las Vegas is hurting. Few cities have been hit by the recession as hard as the one that will host NASCAR this weekend at gleaming Las Vegas Motor Speedway. A severe downturn in the tourism industry combined with a real estate collapse have dealt this desert oasis a severe double blow -- the economic equivalent of a player at the craps table rolling snake eyes.

"We're very reliant in this town on people traveling to Las Vegas for tourism," said Chris Powell, president of Las Vegas Motor Speedway. "And people in a down economic time like we're facing right now -- probably the worst of our lifetimes -- just tend to pull back, and one of the areas where they pull back is on travel. Certainly a destination city like Las Vegas, it hits hard."

In that environment, Sunday's Shelby 427 is a welcome event.

"Every event is important to Las Vegas, as tourism is the key to our economy," said Julian Dugas, sports marketing director for the Las Vegas Convention and Vistors Authority. "Our partnership with NASCAR and the Las Vegas Motor Speedway provides great exposure for our destination with live television coverage and the coverage of national sports writers. Major events are even more important in this difficult economy, and we look forward to welcoming everyone for this year's race."

The downturn is evident in the statistics. According to the Southern Nevada Index of Leading Economic Indicators, complied by the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, visitor traffic as of late 2008 was down nearly 10 percent from a year earlier. Gross gambling revenues were down 15 percent, airport traffic down 14 percent. Keith Schwer, director of the center, offered a bleak forecast. "It is highly likely," he wrote in his most recent report, "that we may see a few more months of difficulty before things get better."

But you don't need numbers to tell you Vegas is in a rough patch. It's obvious just driving through town. Billboards advertise Strip-view hotel rooms at unthinkably low prices. It's easy to find open tables at restaurants that once had an hour wait. Although there's still plenty of pedestrian traffic outside on the Strip, gamblers on one weekday night weren't exactly crowding the high-limit tables inside the casinos. Even the baggage claim area at McCarran International Airport, typically a sea of people, seemed a little less bustling than usual. (Continued)