Sun, Sin & Suburbia
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Sun, Sin & Suburbia

The History of Modern Las Vegas, Revised and Expanded

Geoff Schumacher

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eBook - ePub

Sun, Sin & Suburbia

The History of Modern Las Vegas, Revised and Expanded

Geoff Schumacher

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About This Book

More than forty million visitors per year travel to Sin City to visit the gambling mecca of the world. But gambling is only one part of the city's story. In this carefully documented history, Geoff Schumacher tracks the rise of Las Vegas, including its vital role during World War II; the rise of the Strip in the 1950s; the explosive growth of the 1990s; and the colossal collapse triggered by the real estate bust and economic crisis of the mid-2000s. Schumacher surveys the history of the iconic casinos, debunking myths and highlighting key players such as Howard Hughes, Kirk Kerkorian, and Steve Wynn.Schumacher's history also profiles the Las Vegas where more than two million people live. He explores the neighborhoods sprawling beyond the Strip's neon gleam and uncovers a diverse community offering much more than table games, lounge acts, and organized crime. Schumacher discusses contemporary Las Vegas, charting its course from the nation's fastest-growing metropolis to one of the Great Recession's most battered victims. Sun, Sin & Suburbia will appeal to tourists looking to understand more than the glitz and glitter of Las Vegas and to newcomers who want to learn about their new hometown. It will also be an essential addition to any longtime Nevadan's library of local history.First published in 2012 by Stephens Press, this paperback edition is now available from the University of Nevada Press.

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Year
2015
ISBN
9780874179897

CHAPTER 1

Downtown: The Revival

While this book focuses on recent history, understanding the dynamics of downtown Las Vegas requires some familiarity with the city’s origins. Just about everything happening today in the downtown area has some connection to events that occurred one hundred years ago or more.
The story of Las Vegas’s early days is fairly well-documented. The first non-native believed to have set foot in the valley was Mexican scout Rafael Rivera in 1829. His discovery of the valley’s plentiful springs led other traders to begin traversing the route, which came to be known as the Old Spanish Trail. After famed explorer John C. Fremont documented his 1844 trip through Las Vegas in a best-selling report, the valley became a popular rest stop for parched traders and immigrants. The first white residents arrived in 1855. They were Mormons sent by Brigham Young to serve traders and mail riders and protect them from bandits, and preach the gospel to the Indians. It was a difficult and unpopular mission, fraught with hardships, dissension and discontent, and less than three years later Young ordered the missionaries to pack up and return to Utah. They left only an adobe fort in their wake. (A small part of the fort, the state’s oldest building, still stands within a state park at Las Vegas Boulevard North and Washington Avenue.)
During the remainder of the nineteenth century, Las Vegas was a tiny outpost valued primarily for its water and grass. The Las Vegas Ranch, which encompassed the old Mormon Fort, was the main attraction. Operated by the entrepreneurial Octavius Decatur Gass, the ranch flourished in the 1870s. Gass plowed expansive fields and orchards, raised cattle and planted cottonwood trees that soon served as cool resting places for weary desert travelers. Archibald and Helen Stewart obtained the ranch from Gass, who had fallen on hard times financially, in 1881, and the couple moved there the next year. After her husband was shot and killed under mysterious circumstances in 1884, Helen Stewart continued to operate the ranch into the twentieth century, serving travelers and miners seeking a civilized respite from their harsh daily existence. With just a handful of people living in the Las Vegas area, she started a school, a post office and a church. Today, Helen Stewart is widely hailed as the “First Lady of Las Vegas.”
Las Vegas’s fortunes started to change after the turn of the century when U.S. Senator William Andrews Clark, a Montana copper mining mogul, decided to build a railroad through Las Vegas. As roughly the halfway point between Salt Lake City and Los Angeles, Las Vegas was a logical place to locate repair shops to service the trains. It helped that Las Vegas had a good water supply. Clark bought part of Stewart’s Las Vegas Ranch in 1902 and railroad construction began in 1904. A tent city emerged in the summer of that year west of the tracks. Owned by J.T. McWilliams, the eighty-acre plot (also purchased from Helen Stewart) soon included saloons, restaurants and markets serving miners from the booming Bullfrog and Rhyolite mining districts. Stanley Paher, in his seminal history, Las Vegas: As It Began—As It Grew, described the scene:
“Every general store did a lucrative business, especially in outfitting miners and prospectors who came into town with their burros to rest a few days before heading out again. At Crowell and Alcott’s store on Clark Avenue and Railroad Street people could buy everything from a thimble to a plow, including dry goods, thick hams, dry salt pork, lard, bacon or kegs of beer. The clerks kept busy from early morning until late at night.”
McWilliams struck first in developing a Las Vegas townsite, and as many as 1,500 people lived there before regular train service rolled through the valley. But Clark got the last laugh. On May 15, 1905, the railroad held an auction of 1,200 lots laid out in a grid pattern east of the tracks. On this unusually hot spring day, a crowd of 2,000, mostly from Los Angeles, snapped up 176 lots (for a total of $79,566). Many more lots were sold on the second day. Canvas tents and other primitive buildings quickly sprung up along Fremont Street, Main Street and other newly staked-out dirt paths. Many businesses in the McWilliams townsite moved to Clark’s townsite. Later that year, the McWilliams townsite endured a tremendous fire that left it in ruins. (The McWilliams townsite later became known as the Westside, a poor and primarily African-American neighborhood.)
Though Clark played a pivotal role in the growth of Las Vegas, it is not surprising that few sing his praises today. Clark was, by most accounts, a ruthless businessman and corrupt politician. In a 1907 essay, Mark Twain unleashed a tirade of loathing for Clark: “He is as rotten a human being as can be found anywhere under the flag; he is a shame to the American nation, and no one has helped to send him to the Senate who did not know that his proper place was the penitentiary, with a ball and chain on his legs. To my mind he is the most disgusting creature that the republic has produced since Tweed’s time.”
Las Vegas prospered initially, although in fits and starts, thanks to national economic problems and floods northeast of town that washed out some of the tracks. It became the county seat for the newly created Clark County in 1909, beating out the mining town of Searchlight for the honor. The following year the railroad began building large machine and maintenance shops in Las Vegas, ensuring the employment of hundreds more men. At the same time the railroad built dozens of small bungalow-style houses for its workers (only a handful of which still stand today). However, the town, which incorporated as a city in 1911, didn’t grow much during the 1920s, hampered in part by an acrimonious labor strike in 1922 that prompted the railroad to pull its important repair shops out of Las Vegas. When the Great Depression hit, Las Vegas’s population stood at a modest 5,165.
But the prospects of a giant dam being constructed on the Colorado River buoyed the city. Work began on Hoover Dam in 1931, boosting Las Vegas’s economy, even though the federal government built its own town, Boulder City, for its workers. Even before the dam’s completion in 1935, it and the lake it created became popular tourist attractions.
The legalization of gambling in 1931 did not immediately transform Las Vegas into a vacation destination. Reno was the first city to take full advantage of legal gambling (as well as quickie divorces and marriages). But casino joints along Fremont Street began to flourish in the late 1930s and early ’40s as illegal gambling operators were driven out of other cities and took refuge in Las Vegas. The city received another boost during World War II, as the establishment of the Las Vegas Army Air Field (now Nellis Air Force Base) in the northeast valley and the Basic Magnesium plant in Henderson flooded the town with thousands of new residents.
While the first casinos on what later would become known as the Strip opened for business in the early ’40s, Fremont Street remained the valley’s main attraction, its collage of colorful neon signs prompting the nickname “Glitter Gulch.” But in the ’50s the Strip overtook downtown as the dominant player in Las Vegas tourism, its sprawling resorts drawing visitors who gambled but also enjoyed lounge acts, swanky restaurants and relaxing swimming pools that the tightly packed downtown casinos did not offer.
Despite increasing competition from the Strip, downtown casino operators did not throw in the towel. Instead, they upgraded their facilities, added hotel rooms and catered to serious gamblers and value-conscious visitors. In the ’50s, Binion’s Horseshoe Club, operated by Texas maverick Benny Binion, became a favorite of high-stakes bettors and poker players. In 1965, the Mint Hotel expanded to feature downtown’s first high-rise at twenty-six stories. In the ’70s, a young casino executive named Steve Wynn remodeled and expanded the Golden Nugget, making it as big and luxurious as any Strip resort. Still, for several key reasons, Glitter Gulch fell far behind the Strip in prominence and economic importance. A series of community decisions doomed the downtown casinos to permanent second-class status.
Hollowing out
Fremont and Main is where it all started, where Las Vegas transformed from frontier rest stop to full-fledged city. And for forty years that intersection was the axis around which Las Vegas rotated. It was the heart of “Downtown,” the place where Las Vegans shopped, dined in restaurants, watched movies, bought insurance, attended school and did their banking. It was also where people went if they wanted to gamble, drink and perhaps pay for companionship.
This is no longer true, and hasn’t been for several decades. Development has spread across the valley in all directions, and downtown is no longer the community’s focal point. Las Vegas doesn’t really have a downtown in the way it is understood in other parts of the country. For the most part, people take care of their affairs in or near their neighborhoods, no matter what part of the valley they live in. They have few practical reasons to venture downtown, unless they have a court date or a desire to make demands at City Hall. Redevelopment efforts in recent years have begun to reverse that downward spiral, but downtown Las Vegas is unlikely ever to regain its past glory.
Las Vegas is not unique in this respect. The same can be said of most other Western cities that have developed in the automobile age. America’s love affair with the car has dictated urban development patterns across the country, but it has been particularly influential in the more recently emergent West. Author Jim Harrison describes Western cities as “nearly all ‘outskirts,’” a description that aptly describes Las Vegas. As a result, the concept of a downtown, where a wide array of public and private entities are packed tightly together so people can walk easily from one place to another, has lost its appeal.
And if anything in Las Vegas resembles an urban core, it is the Strip, not downtown. The Strip is the community’s largest employment center. It’s where people go for big-time entertainment such as concerts, stage productions and boxing matches. It’s the focal point of major events such as New Year’s Eve celebrations. It’s the venue of choice for labor demonstrations and activists who want to protest injustice. Joel Garreau, in his landmark 1991 book Edge City: Life on the New Frontier, confirmed this perspective when he called the Strip “the center of people’s perception of what Las Vegas means.” Garreau added: “How many visitors to Las Vegas discover that downtown even exists?”
Downtown’s decline may have been inevitable, but it’s too simple to lay the blame solely on the rise of suburbia and car culture. As with most things, it’s more complicated. A careful examination of Las Vegas’s development patterns over the past seventy years reveals a string of political and economic decisions that contributed to downtown’s diminished importance.
Probably the first strike against downtown came with the construction of Hoover Dam in the early ’30s. Before the dam, Las Vegas was fairly concentrated around its railroad hub at Fremont and Main. The dam project prompted the extension of Fremont Street through the building of Boulder Highway, which connected Las Vegas to the dam site and drew development away from downtown. The most notable early development on Boulder Highway was the Meadows Club, an elegant casino that opened in 1931.
World War II military and industrial projects also fragmented valley development patterns. The Las Vegas Army Air Corps Gunnery School, which later became Nellis Air Force Base, drew development to the northeast and North Las Vegas, while a magnesium plant created the suburb of Henderson to the southeast. These large-scale projects, which drew thousands of soldiers and workers to the valley, did fuel construction of several subdivisions adjacent to downtown, but they also spurred residential and commercial development near the military base and industrial plant.
The improvement of the Los Angeles Highway (now Las Vegas Boulevard) was another major blow to downtown. The highway fueled resort development on a scale that downtown casino operators had never imagined. What eventually became known as the Strip started in 1941 with the opening of the El Rancho Vegas. A year later came the Last Frontier. These trailblazers were followed in 1946 by the Flamingo Hotel, which added a new level of sophistication to the Las Vegas resort experience.
One reason for the Strip’s development: The properties fell outside the city limits. In the unincorporated county, taxes were lower and regulations looser. Seeing an alarming trend, city leaders tried to annex the Strip in 1946—without success. They tried again in 1950, failing once more to bring this burgeoning area into the municipal fold. The Strip casinos rebuffed the city’s attempt by lobbying for the creation of Paradise Township, which could not be annexed without County Commission approval. It stands to reason that if city officials had been successful at that time, they could have done more to ensure downtown remained the centerpiece of the valley’s tourism efforts rather than ceding that distinction to the Strip.
It became clear during the fast-growing ’50s that the Strip was where the action was and would be for years to come. Several key decisions cemented downtown’s fate. The first was the location of what would become McCarran International Airport. The valley’s first commercial air service was offered at the Army’s air field, but increased military operations in the late ’40s forced civic leaders to find a new place for commercial airplanes. They chose a location near the south end of the Strip rather than one more favorable to downtown. McCarran Field opened in 1948 with twelve flights per day.
In 1959, another political decision favored the Strip when the convention center opened on Paradise Road, just east of the Strip. Eugene Moehring, author of Resort City in the Sunbelt, summarized the effect of this decision: “This location behind the Thunderbird awarded the Strip hotels a valuable advantage over their downtown counterparts. As larger conventions came to Las Vegas in the ’60s and ’70s, conventioneers invariably booked rooms in the nearby hotels, and confined their casino play to the Strip. As a result, the area’s surging convention business helped boost the expansion of Strip hotel facilities compared to those along the less strategically located streets downtown.”
The emergence of Maryland Parkway in the late ’50s and ’60s as a hub of local activity further diminished downtown’s prominence. The first building at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, campus, dictated by a large land donation at the south end of Maryland Parkway, opened in 1957. Sunrise Hospital, built by Mervin Adelson, Irwin Molasky and Moe Dalitz’s Paradise Development Company, opened in 1959. The Boulevard Mall, another Paradise Development project, opened in 1967. Molasky said he took advantage of what he saw as the “logical growth area” for Las Vegas. His company essentially master-planned Maryland Parkway, building shopping centers and then residential neighborhoods to support them. “We were selling a house a day over there,” he said of the Paradise Palms subdivision east of Maryland. In theory, the downtown area would have been a logical location for important developments such as the hospital and the mall, but Molasky said politics were a problem at that time within the city limits. “The main thing is that downtown was stagnant,” he said. “They didn’t put money back into it. They kept the old houses down there. They played a lot of politics in those days. They just wanted to keep the status quo.”
These specific projects are only part of the story. A look at the bigger picture suggests some general trends that supersede individual developments. Cheap land as far as the eye could see was a major factor. First, the farther the land was from the city center, the more cheaply it could be obtained. As long as builders had access to utilities, they could enhance the bottom line. Second, the vast stretches of undeveloped land encouraged low-rise, low-density construction. Buildings tended to be one story and spread out. The desire to build in this manner deterred developers from investing in downtown, where lots were small and numerous and complicated ownerships made it difficult and expensive to assemble large parcels. Also, Las Vegas prided itself on a laissez-faire approach to urban planning, which allowed for chaotic, checkerboard development. A stronger commitment to proper land planning may have dictated a more sensible city expansion that would have required large commercial and civic developments to be sited downtown.
Redevelopment
Downtown Las Vegas still exists, of course, and it continues to attract tourists and locals in large numbers—just not on the massive scale enjoyed by the Strip. Vigorous efforts to redevelop the area around Fremont and Main have proved successful in recent years, and optimism about the future is running high. Besides the casino row, downtown remains the valley’s government and legal hub, hosting Las Vegas City Hall, the Clark County Government Center, the Sawyer State Office Building, the Clark County Detention Center and all the local, state and federal courts.
But downtown advocates weren’t always so bright and cheery. In the late ’80s, downtown appeared to be in deep trouble. The opening of the Mirage Hotel on the Strip in 1989 seemed to signal downtown’s imminent demise, at least as a gambling center. The Strip, following the lead of Steve Wynn, had emerged from the doldrums of the ’80s with a strong desire to reinvent itself and expand its markets. As the Strip offered a greater variety of attractions, tourists were less likely to visit downtown during their vacations.
Meanwhile, the concept of the neighborhood casino began to take hold in a big way. At the time, a large chunk of downtown’s customer base was local. When hotel-casinos with buffets, bowling alleys and movie theaters began cropping up in suburban neighborhoods, locals drifted away from downtown haunts in favor of the gambling hall just down the street. The rise of riverboat casinos and Indian reservation casinos in other states further gouged downtown’s market share.
Something had to be done to stop the bleeding. The city’s first effort began in 1987 when officials approached Bob Snow, a Florida developer, about building a new downtown resort. They enticed him by agreeing to contribute $17 million in taxpayer funds to the project. Two years later Snow purchased the money-losing Park Hotel, on Main Street east of Fremont, and built what he eventually named Main Street Station (the project started as Winchester Station and later was called Church Street Station, the same name as his Orlando facility). Snow’s $82 million casino was a step up in luxury compared with most of its downtown competitors. A Victorian theme was carried throughout, and Main Street Station featured elegant appointments such as hardwood floors, stained glass and an expensive antique collection.
But Main Street Station’s beauty did not translate into customers. It was a failure almost as soon as it opened on August 30, 1991. Just a month after its grand opening, Main Street Station laid off 150 employees, while dozens of building contractors filed liens against the property. Snow declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy in December 1991, and 200 more employees were laid off a month later. In April 1992 Bank of America announced plans to auction Snow’s thousands of antiques, which he had used as collateral for his casino loan. Main Street Station closed in June 1992.
Why did Main Street Station fail? With costly construction overruns, marketers had only $140,000 available to promote the resort’s opening, a pittance compared with the investment in other casino openings. Some executives and observers blamed Snow himself, citing his perfectionist approach and his refusal to listen to the advice of seasoned casino operators. Others noted that the resort’s 430 rooms were old and nondescr...

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