Like Texarkana, Las Vegas is a town made by the railroad-in this case, the San Pedro, Los Angeles and Salt Lake.
Lots were auctioned in 2005. A town was born.
It was a stopover, and for several years, a few blocks of Fremont Street up from the train station offered a few saloons and gambling, but the main attraction in those days was Block 16-one street north. You could drink and gamble there, too. But, most importantly, you could find ready female companionship.
The Nevada Legislature caught a dose of morality in 1910 and outlawed gambling. Then Prohibition came in 1920. Booze and dice were both shoved underground. Neither law affected business on Block 16.
Even after the Legislature decided money trumped morality and legalized gambling in 1931, Las Vegas wasn't a big tourist destination. Reno was Nevada's big draw. Flashy casinos lured gamblers, and liberal divorce laws drew unhappy wives from around the country for a six-week residency requirement before they could be "Reno-vated," as New York society columnist Maury Paul called it.
(Bible-belt Arkansas dropped its residency requirement to six weeks as well, in hopes of cutting into Reno's divorce action.)
It wasn't until the construction of Boulder Dam that Vegas came into its own. Thousands of workers brought their paychecks downtown to Fremont Street to have a few drinks and court the roulette wheel and then headed to Block 16 for a different type of courting.
World War II brought the end of Block 16. Military authorities from what would become Nellis Air Force Base ordered it closed in 1941.
But that was OK. The girls moved just outside the city limits to Formyle or became a bit more discreet. And Downtown-Fremont Street-had by this time become the main drag, with more than a dozen casinos of various sizes, all with big, neon signs.
And then came the Strip.
The Strip-Las Vegas Boulevard-is not actually in Las Vegas proper. It's part of Clark County. The El Rancho Vegas was the first hotel-casino on the Strip when it opened in 1941. The main building housed the lobby, restaurant, showroom and casino. Guests stayed in bungalows around the grounds. It offered a chuckwagon buffet and a western, "come as you are" atmosphere. There was even horseback riding.
The second big Strip property, the Last Frontier, continued the cowboy motif and even had a mock Western town, the Last Frontier Village, which included a saloon/casino that later became the freestanding Silver Slipper when the village was torn down.
The atmosphere changed when a guy name Billy Wilkerson, who owned the famous Trocadero nightclub in Hollywood, as well as the Hollywood Reporter newspaper, decided to build a world-class luxury resort in the desert.
He called it the Flamingo, and he spared no expense. That meant he soon ran out of money.
Enter a partner: Benjamin Siegel, better known as Bugsy, though never to his face.
Wilkerson was forced out. Siegel took over the project and spent several million of the mob's money over the original $1 million budget. Even worse, when he opened the casino doors-before the hotel rooms were finished-the house hit a losing streak. He had to shut down and wait until the hotel was completed.
Things went better when he reopened, but by that time, Siegel's luck had run out. The mob figured he was skimming the profits for himself and took him out while he was relaxing in his girlfriend's Beverly Hills home.
That set a pattern-no violence in Vegas. Brings heat and bad press. Scares the tourists. It's not wise to disturb the cash cow.
More hotels followed, among them the Thunderbird, Desert Inn, Sands, Sahara, Stardust, Royal Nevada (which went bankrupt and was absorbed by the Stardust), Tropicana and Riviera.
It should be understood that all of these places had two sets of owners-the guys whose names were on the license and the guys whose names were not on any official paperwork. The front men kept the real bosses happy with suitcases full of cash skimmed off the top in the casino count room and delivered each month by courier to gentlemen in New York, Chicago, Miami, Providence and elsewhere.
The Las Vegas I first knew was a city in transition. It was just starting to get away from the past and moving into the future-from the mob era to the corporate age. I was able to see it evolve over the years. I caught the last gasp of "old" Las Vegas and have seen the development of the city we know today.
If your only experience with Las Vegas has been in the past 25 years or so, you'll find it hard to believe what things were like back in the late 1960s and well into the 1970s.
When we started going to Las Vegas, many of the hotels were still basically motels. The Riviera was the first high rise when it was built in 1955, but for years after, even the most well-known places were two-story motels. Some, like the Sands, Desert Inn, Dunes and Sahara, built relatively modest towers in the 1960s to house more rooms, but most of their original structures were intact.
That was fine with my mother and her fear of heights. The second floor was about as high as she wanted to go in any hotel, and that was under duress. We could go to the pool, look up and see the Desert Inn's impressive tower-nine whole stories tall. But my mother could walk from the pool into our ground-floor room, one of the originals from the day the place opened.
What we-or at least I-didn't know the first time we stared up at that tower in 1967 was that the super-rich recluse Howard Hughes was living on the top floor. He also owned the hotel. He had arrived in 1966 and moved in. But he didn't gamble, and the owners wanted him gone to make way for high rollers. So he wrote a check-the first of many Las Vegas acquisitions-and would remain in residence there until 1970.
Just about all the casinos were set back from the street, not like now, where they crowd the sidewalks all along he Strip, and nearly all had parking lots-a real rarity these days.
Inside, the hotels were mostly the same. There was a lobby, fairly small and close to the casino-sometimes in the casino. The gaming floor, with tables in the middle and slots on the sides. Back then, a hotel with 300 or 400 slots and 20 or more tables was a big place. Craps, roulette, blackjack and the Big Six wheel. One or two big baccarat tables. No Caribbean Stud or Let it Ride or Pai Gow or anything like that. Some hotels had a race and sports book. A few, not many, had poker. There were a couple of bars, a showroom, a lounge. Three restaurants at most-a coffee shop, a buffet and the "gourmet" room-and that meant steaks, lobster, American versions of heavy French cuisine. No big-name chefs.
There was always a pool-just one, usually, though a few places may have had a kiddie pool. Some hotels had golf courses. Very few hotels then (or now) had tennis courts.
There were no big shopping malls, though most hotels had a few stores. A menswear shop, a ladies' dress shop, a gift shop, a jewelry store. There weren't any "spas" as we know them, though there were barber and beauty shops and-usually for men only-a steam room with a masseur on duty.
It might not sound like much now, but believe me, no one felt deprived. That was what used to be considered living large.
I thought Las Vegas was magic. I could sleep late and play in the pool all day. At night, we would drive along the Strip or go downtown and look at the dazzling neon signs-the Stardust and the old Golden Nugget were the most spectacular. And we ate. A lot. The buffets were nothing compared to those in Vegas today, but they were incredible for the time. There were also some great restaurants not attached to the resorts.
All the casinos had special food deals-come-ons to lure gamblers who might drop coins in the slots or take a flier at the tables. But Downtown always had the best deals. After-midnight steak-and-egg specials for under a buck. Hot dogs, hamburgers and the like for 10 cents or a quarter or free with a coupon from one of the "fun books" passed out everywhere. Shrimp cocktail for 50 cents or a dollar.
These places also handed out souvenirs-free key chains, pens, other cheap trinkets. I always came home with a bunch of swag my parents collected during their wanderings. The Horseshoe would take your photo with their display of $1 million in $10,000 bills. Of course, you had to wait for it to be developed. That was time the club hoped you would kill at the dice or card tables.
I didn't get to see the shows on those early trips. It wasn't that they were too racy-though some no doubt were. It was because the hotels didn't want kids cutting up and bothering the adults. Las Vegas wouldn't try the "family friendly" approach until years down the road.
And, of course, I couldn't linger in the casino, though I spent a lot of time watching the action from a safe distance. And I did manage to get away from my parents when I was about 10 or 11 and drop a quarter in a slot machine in the vestibule of a South Strip restaurant. Won 50 bucks, too. My mother walked out as the coins dropped and pretended she had won. My parents scolded me in a half-hearted way. I think they were more amused than anything else, and I got to keep the cash-a fortune to a kid when a dollar was a lot more like a dollar than it is today.
That's how it was during those first years after we started visiting Las Vegas. But there were changes coming, and all you had to do was look to the northwest corner of Las Vegas Boulevard and Flamingo Road to get a glimpse of what the future would bring.
But that will have to wait until next week.