By the early 1940s, downtown Las Vegas had several luxury hotels and a dozen small but successful gambling clubs. In 1941, a businessman by the name of Thomas Hull, who owned a string of motor inns in California, decided to open the El Rancho Las Vegas, just outside the city limits right off the highway from Los Angeles. The El Rancho had 100 motel rooms, a western styled casino, it was located right off the highway and had a large parking lot with an inviting swimming pool in the middle. The success of the El Rancho Vegas triggered a small building boom in the late 1940s including construction of several hotel- casinos fronting on a two-lane highway leading into Las Vegas from Los Angeles – a stretch of road that has evolved into today’s Las Vegas Strip.
During this time the celebrated mobster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel visited Las Vegas. A key player in a national crime organization known as the Syndicate, Siegel, had spent most of the 1930’s in Hollywood, overseeing L.A.’s half-a-million-dollar-a-day bookmaking enterprise and paling around with studio executives and movie stars on the side. But when Nevada became the only state in the Union to legalize the racewire, a service that relayed thoroughbred racing results to off-track bookies across the country, Syndicate boss Meyer Lansky sent Siegel to take over the action in Las Vegas
Siegel had every reason to believe that Las Vegas was headed for a spectacular boom. Two new defense installations had been recently situated on the outskirts of town, which together had brought thousands of people and their payrolls into Las Vegas’s orbit. And now that the country was at war, hordes of impatient couples were already stampeding over the border into Nevada, where state law allowed them to tie the knot without waiting for the blood tests required back home.
Since Las Vegas already ranked as the country’s top spot to dump a spouse (edging out with Reno for the honor)– Siegel figured the casinos on Fremont Street would soon be packed to the rafters. A “quickie” divorce could be attained after six weeks of residency. These short-term residents stayed at “dude ranches” which were the forerunners of the sprawling Strip hotels.
Siegel wanted a resort that would change the Strip. The El Rancho and the Hotel Last Frontier were set in a western theme. Siegel saw something different – Hollywood in Vegas. He saw lights, class, and headliners appearing. As far as Siegel was concerned, “Cowboy” was dead and “Hollywood” was in. Boy, he got that right.
The Flamingo with a giant pink neon sign and replicas of pink flamingos on the lawn, opened on New Year’s Eve 1946. While the El Rancho Vegas and other 1940s resorts followed a western ranch-styled theme, the Flamingo was modeled after resort hotels in Miami and Cuba. Siegel spared no expense on his resort. He built a pool, tennis courts and riding stable to create a resort that not only attracted the Hollywood set, but gave its visitors a variety of diversions from their inevitable losses at the tables. With its swank atmosphere, wall-to-wall carpeting and a new-fangled air cooling system, The Flamingo would become a favorite hot spot for the Hollywood crowd.
But by the time construction was finally completed, in the spring of 1947, Siegel had overrun his budget by four and a half million dollars, and the Syndicate’s mood had soured. A few months later, Siegel was gunned down in his girlfriend’s Beverly Hills home. No one was ever convicted for the murder, but a few weeks later Lansky’s deputies took over The Flamingo. Its like they say - when you’re out of money you’re just out.
Just before dawn on January 27th, 1951, a blinding white flash lit up the Las Vegas sky. Minutes later, there was a thundering blast that left a trail of broken glass from Fremont Street clear out to the Strip. Atomic bomb testing at the Nevada proving facility had begun.
“We have glorified gambling, divorces and doubtful pleasures to get our name before the rest of the country,” wrote the Las Vegas Sun. “Now we can become a part of the most important work carried on by our country today. We have found a reason for our existence as a community.”
In April, the press is invited to view and broadcast the detonation of a nuclear device on the Nevada Proving Grounds. Americans watch the detonation of the 31-kiloton device from the safety of their living rooms. Over the next twelve years, 235 nuclear devices — an average of one every few weeks — would be detonated above ground in the Mohave desert, just 65 miles from downtown Las Vegas.
The atomic craze sweeps the nation, and Las Vegas capitalizing on the publicity garnered by the tests, begins marketing the detonations as one of their city’s attractions, including the annual Miss Atom Bomb Beauty Pagent. It’s the 1950’s. Welcome to the “Atomic City.”
The 1960’s were to be equally as interesting. In the early hours of Thanksgiving morning 1966, a private train rattled into a desolate crossing in North Las Vegas. From the trailing car emerged one of the wealthiest men in the world — the legendary billionaire recluse, Howard Robard Hughes.
In his youth, Hughes had been a full-fledged American celebrity: the dashing movie producer whose exploits had provided endless fodder for gossip columns, the record-breaking aviator who had been honored with a hero’s ticker tape parade. But though only a few people knew it, that man was long gone. Plagued by chronic back pain and hopelessly addicted to narcotics, Hughes had spent much of the last three years in near-total seclusion, his mind careening between rationality and full-blown dementia.
Now, he had come to Las Vegas, his old stomping ground, seeking tax shelter for his riches and refuge from the hounding attention of the press. Accompanied by a phalanx of beefy Mormon caretakers, he took up residence at the famed Desert Inn, where an old acquaintance, Las Vegas Sun publisher Hank Greenspun, had reserved the entire eighth and ninth floors for his personal use.
One week passed. Then two. But to the Desert Inn’s dismay, Hughes and his entourage showed no signs of moving on. They were not the exactly the kind of guests you wanted taking up your best rooms. Hughes never gambled and his aides were all Mormon, so they they didn’t drink and they didn’t tip, nor did they need any of the other “services” that Las Vegas provided. But Hughes liked Los Vegas and wouldn’t leave.
The Desert Inn’s solution was fairly elegant and on April Fools Day, 1967, official title to the Desert Inn passed to Howard Hughes. “I have decided this once and for all,” Hughes declared in a memo to his aides. “I want to acquire even more hotels and . . . make Las Vegas as trustworthy and respectable as the New York Stock Exchange.”
Cloistered round-the-clock in his makeshift headquarters, the eccentric billionaire now began to collect Strip hotels and casinos as if they were snow globes or stamps: the Frontier and the Sands and the Castaways; the Silver Slipper, a small casino across from the Desert Inn, whose revolving marquee reportedly disturbed his sleep; and the massive Landmark Hotel, which officially opened in July 1969. When Hughes left four years later he was the largest employer in the state of Nevada and Wall Street had come to recognize the potential of the ‘gaming industry”.
The heir to Hughes legacy is perhaps Steve Wynn. He opened the 3,049-room Mirage Hotel-Casino opened in the fall of 1989 at a construction cost of $630 million. It features a white tiger habitat, a dolphin pool, an elaborate swimming pool and waterfall and a man-made volcano that belches fire and water. He also constructed the 2,900-room Treasure Island adjacent to The Mirage at a cost of $430 million. The hotel features Buccaneer Bay where a full scale pirate ship and British frigate engage in a battle of cannon fire. In the end, the pirates blast the British and the frigate slowly sinks beneath the churning waves.
Wynn lost control of his empire to MGM Grand in a hostile take over. He didn’t do too badly, walking away with a little bit over 400 million dollars. This he immediately plowed back into the sand, purchasing a large track of land at the end of the Strip and building The Wynn, a 2700 hundred room resort, with 19 restaurants, a golf course, spa and pool. In December, he opens Encore a 2400 room all suites extension to the property.
It’s a 1.2 billion dollar bet that Las Vegas will continue to prosper. But then, you can’t have gambling without optimism.
