Las Vegas celebrated a birthday last week—its 120th, to be precise. That’s a nice, round, biblical number, so it is an occasion for some reflection on the last 12 decades of Las Vegas. Befitting a town inexorably linked with gambling, that history has had many unexpected turns.
Las Vegas as a city was a creation of the Salt Lake, Los Angeles, and San Pedro Railroad, the product of a marriage of convenience between geography and speculation. Just about midway between Salt Lake City and Los Angeles, with a natural spring providing water, this former Mormon outpost seemed as good a place as any to establish a foothold in the Mojave. With a land auction on May 15 and 16, 1905, the town was open for business.
The railroad defined Las Vegas in its first two decades. Now the railroad days seem like a footnote, but it’s hard to overstate just how reliant the growing city was on the railroad. And even the proudest boosters would have to admit, in their heart of hearts, that Las Vegas was a remarkably unremarkable small Western town. Yes, it had its railroad-approved vice district (Block 16), but so did just about every other burg of note west of the Mississippi.
After 1931, three new attractions would give Las Vegas its first taste of broader notoriety. Hoover Dam gave the region an economic shot in the arm (federal paychecks at the height of the Great Depression were a godsend), while the newly liberalized gambling (or, as the locals prefer to call it, commercial gaming) and divorce laws began to transform the town into a tourist destination.
As it positioned itself in the 1940s, Las Vegas drew mostly on its Western identity. Helldorado days, which began in 1935, leaned heavily into a nostalgia for an Old West that Las Vegas was too young to have truly enjoyed. Then, in 1951, the federal government dropped a rad-ticking bonanza into the city’s lap: the Nevada Test Site would host atomic blasts that would help the nation’s military and scientists prepare to fight and survive a nuclear war, fusing cutting-edge science with patriotic duty. After some initial trepidation, locals gloried in their self-promoted reputation as an “atomic city.”
While the bombs were bursting at the Test Site, Las Vegas’s casino business was booming. Here’s where another scary but tamed (or was it really?) entity comes along: organized crime. Although civic leaders strenuously denied any Mob involvement as federal pressure threatened throughout the 1950s and 1960s, organized crime was enough of a presence that we have a world-class museum dedicated to the Mob in the very building that hosted the Las Vegas installment of the Kefauver hearings. Like it had with nuclear detonations, Las Vegas transmuted organized crime from something deadly to, in essence, a tourist attraction.
If the essence of gambling is to look the unknown in the eyes without blinking, it might be fitting that Las Vegas succeeded in harnessing two of the 20th century’s deadliest forces, turning them to its own benefit.
It’s often said that Las Vegas implodes its history. In truth, the shelf life of the average casino is rather less than most civic institutions, but there is incredible continuity in the Mojave. Take cowboys: the original mascots of Las Vegas, they were submerged in favor of nuclear scientists, the Rat Pack, and Elvis. But economic realities put cowboys front and center again, as the city lured National Finals Rodeo to town in 1985. Filling rooms for a big chunk of the sleepiest month made Las Vegas quite happy to claim cowboys as their own.
That being said, don’t bet on above-ground nuclear testing coming back anytime soon—as the long opposition to a federal nuclear waste deposit at Yucca Mountain has shown, some sensibilities have changed.
The more recent past has lessons for us as well. At the time of its centennial in 2005, the image of Las Vegas seemed fairly fixed. It was a gambling and tourist town that had recently upped its culinary and entertainment game. Bigtime boxing and mixed martial arts bouts were about as far as the city would intrude into the world of major league sports, and it seemed likely that Las Vegas would continue along this route.
Twenty years later, though, Las Vegas has multiple big-league teams and multiple championship banners, and a new thread in its civic identity. Not many could have predicted this outcome, but in retrospect it seems obvious. So obvious, maybe, that when the city’s 140th birthday rolls around, most residents won’t be able to imagine a time when they didn’t have big-league sports.
One could also look at an event like Electric Daisy Carnival. Held at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway, on its face EDC seems completely at odds with much of the history of Las Vegas tourism, when the value of entertainment was not its aesthetic quality or even its box office, but how much the fans it drew gambled. An event miles from the Strip and Downtown, with hours seemingly designed to keep potential players out of the casino, would have been unthinkable. Yet it has been a seasonal fixture for over a decade, and festivals of all sorts have thrived.
When people ask me if some suggested innovation has a chance at catching on, I like to imagine a Las Vegan in 1931 scoffing at the possibility of people vacationing in Las Vegas to gamble rather than visiting the dam construction site, or someone more recently explaining why sports could never work. In other words, the past isn’t always a guide to the future.
Still, I recognize that you might be curious about the past of Las Vegas, and specifically its casinos. I will close by humbly suggesting that, if this is the case, you consider taking a look at my most recent book, Something for Your Money: A History of Las Vegas Casinos. It might provide some food for thought as you contemplate what the next 120 years might bring.
So until next time, expect the unexpected, stay informed, and I’ll stay informal.
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