Sun, Sin & Suburbia: The History of Modern Las Vegas, Revised and Expanded

By Geoff Schumacher

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9780874179897

Book preview

Sun, Sin & Suburbia

THE HISTORY OF MODERN LAS VEGAS

Geoff Schumacher

REVISED AND EXPANDED EDITION

University of Nevada Press

Reno and Las Vegas

The first edition of Sun, Sin & Suburbia was published in 2004 and the second edition in 2012 by Stephens Press. This University of Nevada Press edition is a reprint of the 2012 edition.

University of Nevada Press, Reno, Nevada 89557 USA

Copyright © 2015 by University of Nevada Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Design by Sue Campbell

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

ISBN-13: 978-0-87417-988-0 (paper) —

ISBN-13: 978-0-87417-989-7 (e-book)

For Erin and Sara

Contents

Preface to the Revised and Expanded Edition

Introduction: Making a Life in the City of Sun, Sin, and Suburbia

Chapter 1

Downtown: The Revival

Chapter 2

The Strip: 1941–1988

Chapter 3

The Strip: 1989–2012

Chapter 4

Howard Hughes: The Game Changer

Chapter 5

Summerlin: Taking the Edge Off Desert Living

Chapter 6

Henderson: The Master-Planned City

Photographs

Chapter 7

North Las Vegas: Two Cities in One

Chapter 8

The Federal Role: Balancing Act

Chapter 9

Lap of Luxury: Las Vegas Goes Upscale

Chapter 10

Transportation: Better Late than Never

Chapter 11

The Reckoning: Riches to Rags

Chapter 12

The Future: Hope Floats

Recommended Reading

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Index

Preface to the Revised and Expanded Edition

The first edition of Sun, Sin & Suburbia was published in the fall of 2004—at the apex of the Las Vegas boom years. Eight years and one devastating recession later, the community had undergone such profound changes that we thought it was time to update the story of modern Las Vegas.

This new edition has been extensively rewritten and updated to reflect developments over the past several years, from the rise of CityCenter to the fall of the economy. Sections have been added to recognize new players and initiatives. Some things that seemed important in 2004 turned out not to be historically relevant, and so they were omitted. A lot of ground is covered in this new edition, but it is not a comprehensive history. Modern Las Vegas is just too big and complex to get that treatment in a single volume.

It’s often said that the one constant in Las Vegas is change. A cursory comparison of the first and second editions of Sun, Sin & Suburbia gives credence to this adage.

Introduction: Making a Life in the City of Sun, Sin, and Suburbia

Vegas is a town . . . where the vast majority of the population arises every morning absolutely delighted to have escaped Hometown, America and the necessity of chatting with Mom over the back fence.

—DAVE HICKEY, AIR GUITAR

There may be some who feel that Las Vegas is an abomination and should be destroyed. They would then have to argue, with me at least, that the oil companies are straight, the stock market is not a flimflam, and that our South American policy is not insane. They would even have to argue that the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are more honest than the Mafia.

—MARIO PUZO, INSIDE LAS VEGAS

Several years ago, while perusing the shelves of a used bookstore, I happened upon a 1979-80 edition of Arthur Frommer’s Guide to Las Vegas. A quick flip through the chapters sparked a swirl of nostalgia about the pre-megaresort city and what dramatic changes had occurred over the past two decades. The guide painted a picture of a Las Vegas that was quite different from today. For example, Steve Wynn’s name was mentioned only once in the guide, in passing reference to his ownership of the Golden Nugget. Also, a map of the area did not show the U.S. 95 expressway, and Rancho Drive was called Tonopah Highway.

The guide listed just two hospitals: Sunrise and Southern Nevada Memorial (now University Medical Center), although a few others were operating at the time. There are a dozen major hospitals today and counting. The main movie house in town was the Red Rock Theatres on West Charleston Boulevard, which closed several years ago and was demolished. The guide made no mention of master-planned communities. The Las Vegas Hilton was the state’s tallest building, a distinction it lost well before the Stratosphere Tower was finished in the mid-’90s. Frommer’s listed only one disco, Jubilation, owned by Paul Anka and described as Las Vegas’s answer to Studio 54. A quarter-century later, Las Vegas had forty dance clubs, including one called Studio 54.

The top ten hotels in 1980 were MGM Grand (now Bally’s), Caesars Palace, Las Vegas Hilton, Desert Inn, Flamingo Hilton, Tropicana, Aladdin, Riviera, Dunes and Sands. Today, four of those hotels had been torn down (Dunes, Sands, Aladdin, Desert Inn), and only one of them (Caesars Palace) would make anyone’s top ten list. That’s not a criticism, just an acknowledgement that the modern megaresorts have eclipsed the industry leaders of the past.

Of course, Las Vegas residents don’t need a musty Frommer’s Guide to know the place has changed significantly over the past thirty years. Just walk outside and the evidence is everywhere. Clark County’s population in 1980 was 463,087. Today, the county population is two million. Those additional people have radically altered almost every aspect of life. Thousands of acres of scrub brush and lizards are now covered with houses, apartment complexes, shopping centers, casinos, bars, restaurants, schools, parks and other accouterments of suburban living. The city has spread from the valley’s center in all directions, its momentum slowed only by time, money and mountain ranges. During the ’90s, the critics’ mantra was that Las Vegas was developing at a rate of two acres every hour.

As dozens of new neighborhoods cropped up at the edges, the urban core suffered. Downtown lost its luster. The tourist numbers on Fremont Street plummeted as the Strip, with its myriad extracurricular attractions, came to dominate visitors’ interest. McCarran International Airport expanded to accommodate the growing tourist hordes, which required the acquisition of hundreds of homes to be demolished to make way for new gates and runways, as well as an ever-widening noise corridor. The expansion of U.S. 95 and construction of the Las Vegas Beltway required the demolition of hundreds more homes across the valley. The rush to the suburbs made residential living along some streets unbearable. Long stretches of Decatur Boulevard and Jones Boulevard, for example, once were lined with houses. Today, many of those houses have been torn down or converted into shops and offices.

Of course, the growth wasn’t all bad. More than anything, it gave residents more choices in employment, housing, recreation and culture. Tourism remained the city’s economic engine but it was now possible to work in an array of interesting and rewarding fields not linked to the resort industry. Housing options widened. One could live in a brand-new tract house on the outskirts or move close to the action, buying an old place downtown and fixing it up. The apartment market offered an array of options, and condos ran from cheap to the pinnacle of jetset leisure. As for recreation, Las Vegas had almost everything imaginable—even that most unlikely of desert pastimes, ice hockey. Perhaps the most significant benefits of growth were the cultural additions, from museums to art galleries, orchestras to ballet companies, rock ’n’ roll concert halls to roller coasters. It seemed physically impossible for one person in one lifetime to sample all of the city’s fine dining establishments. Las Vegas evolved well beyond its trademark lounges and buffets.

Some say Las Vegas is completely different from other cities. Others say once you venture beyond the Strip, it’s basically the same as anyplace else. They’re both right. Geography distinguishes Las Vegas from many other cities. It isn’t by an ocean, lake or river. It isn’t in the mountains, and it doesn’t sit amid vast farmland. Its location is notable only because it’s near the halfway point of the railroad line between Salt Lake City and Los Angeles.

The city was not founded by any religious or ethnic groups. The nineteenth century Mormon settlers didn’t stay long. None of its neighborhoods is primarily Italian or Polish or Chinese. While its black population once was segregated into one area, that practice ended decades ago, and the area in question, the Westside or West Las Vegas, is now a melting pot of race and ethnicity. Areas that are now primarily Hispanic didn’t start out that way, but evolved with high levels of immigration and new housing construction that encouraged white flight.

Las Vegas differs from many other cities, especially those back East, in that its history is not woven into the fabric of its culture. Boston is the home of Revolutionary War rebellion. Philadelphia is the birthplace of independence. San Francisco was the cradle of the Gold Rush and later the counterculture. Las Vegas did not contribute in such a way to the American story until more recently, when it became the catalyst for the mainstreaming of gambling.

Las Vegas does share one key characteristic with many other cities: It is associated with a dominant industry. Pittsburgh had steel, Detroit has cars, Hollywood has movies, Las Vegas has gambling. And for a long time Las Vegas’s dominant industry made it a unique company town: No other major American city had legal gambling halls. That is no longer true. Gambling in some form is now legal in forty-eight states, and casino-style games are offered in cities such as Atlantic City, Detroit and New Orleans, and on riverboats and Indian reservations across the land.

However, Las Vegas is still the only major city that depends almost entirely on gambling for its livelihood. Gambling, along with the accompanying attractions, remains the beating heart of the economy. A third of Las Vegans work directly for the industry, and another third work for it in indirect ways. The final third percent most likely wouldn’t be here without it.

While some Las Vegans don’t gamble, they find it difficult to divorce themselves completely from the industry’s charms. The casinos host most of the city’s best restaurants. They also have movie theaters, concert venues, nightclubs, showrooms, art museums, bowling alleys and even an ice skating rink, making them the city’s primary cultural and recreational centers. This fact certainly helps make the case that Las Vegas is different from other cities.

And yet, in many ways, Las Vegas is very much like other places, especially those in the Southwest. Not far from the Strip are residential neighborhoods made up of middle-class suburban houses surrounding parks, ballfields, schools and churches. Shopping centers feature supermarkets, laundromats, hair salons and drugstores, while fast-food restaurants and convenience stores crowd around the intersections of major thoroughfares. It’s the usual pattern, except with slot machines in the stores.

Many Las Vegans today have lifestyles that simply do not involve the casinos. With a little effort, a resident can avoid setting foot in a Strip hotel for months at a time. Oftentimes a prolonged absence from the resort corridor ends only when a visiting relative or friend wants a guide to see what all the excitement is about.

I can remember when Rainbow Boulevard was a gravel road. Well, at least parts of Rainbow were gravel when I was a boy, and today it’s a major thoroughfare. Longtime residents are famous for making comments like this. The gravel road in question depends on how long you’ve been around. Some old-timers can remember when Decatur was a gravel road, and it developed decades ahead of Rainbow.

For some reason, this question of Las Vegas longevity fascinates us. Most natives are proud they were born in Las Vegas; it doesn’t take long after meeting one to learn about his hardscrabble youth when the community was small and it took only ten minutes to drive across town.

I’m not a native. My family moved to Las Vegas from Wisconsin in 1977, when I was in the fifth grade. But when I would tell people how long I’d been there, they’d typically say, Well, that makes you a native. Not quite, but I can say that I lived in Las Vegas longer than more than a million and a half people who came after me.

Plenty of people possess at least a snapshot knowledge of Las Vegas history, whether they learned it in school or picked it up from books, museums, cable television programs or conversations with longtime residents. The key moments tend to come up in conversation from time to time as newcomers wonder aloud just how this city emerged from the Mojave sands. But at the same time, it’s often difficult to draw solid lines between the Las Vegas of black-and-white photographs and the modern metropolis. As you drive around the valley, it’s a challenge to find remnants of that time before themed resorts and master-planned communities, neighborhood casinos and business parks. Most everything you see has been built over the past thirty years.

Las Vegas history starts with thousands of years of Native American habitation and almost 160 years of continual occupation by people of European heritage. Las Vegas has many stories to tell about its origins, its early settlers, its evolution into the world’s gambling capital. But all that pales in comparison to the dramatic changes that have occurred since about 1980. Nonetheless, in order to understand what has happened recently, it’s important to be at least vaguely acquainted with what happened before. Although this book focuses on more recent decades, I provide a brief chronology of Las Vegas’s early history in the first chapter, in the hope it will help to put recent happenings in the proper context. In researching this book, I constantly found important linkages between more recent historical developments and the city’s pioneer days.

It’s sometimes difficult to assess Las Vegas’s recent history because, in many cases, it’s still unfolding. For example, this book contains a chapter about the Summerlin master-planned community, yet the massive development won’t be completed for at least another decade. Another chapter discusses the Las Vegas Beltway, though it won’t reach its full potential for several more years. Some facts and figures in this book will be outdated by the time it hits store shelves. But that’s the nature of most books about Las Vegas, and it only reinforces the vibrant, intriguing, important story that modern Las Vegas has to tell.

A frequently asked question in Las Vegas is, Do you like it here? This must be a common question in other cities, but it seems to carry greater weight in Las Vegas, in part explaining the high transience of the population. People come here to live and spend a few months deciding whether they like it. If they do, they stay. If they don’t, they may leave. Often it takes longer than a few months for somebody to feel comfortable here. Other cities seem to have much less coming and going. So, do I like Las Vegas? My woefully predictable answer: Yes and no.

On the positive side, I like the climate. Las Vegas has terrific weather at least seven months of the year. That’s a pretty good percentage if you think about it. Spring and fall are mild. Winter can get chilly but rarely bitterly cold. There is little snow to speak of, maybe some flurries once a year, and rain is infrequent at best. Summers can get intolerably hot—it’s a dry heat, as they say, but that doesn’t sell when it’s 110 with no breeze for two straight weeks. But unless they’re in San Diego, who can say they live in a climate that doesn’t have a few uncomfortable months? It’s also worth noting that Las Vegas is unlikely to endure hurricanes, tornadoes, blizzards, mudslides or devastating earthquakes (although seismologists say the city falls within an earthquake zone). The city is prone to flash floods, perhaps once a year, but they usually aren’t too bad if you’re smart enough not to drive through deep water. A massive flood control project has minimized the risks for neighborhoods once susceptible to flooding.

Until the recent downturn, I also was very appreciative of Las Vegas’s economy. It was booming most of the time I lived there, and the costs of living stayed relatively low. Unemployment was low, wages were relatively good and the opportunity for advancement in almost any field was great. In my twenty-three years of post-college employment in Las Vegas, I was never lacking a good job, and I was able to steadily advance in my field. While not every Las Vegan can tell such a story—the city has its share of homeless and poor, and the recession took a brutal toll on employment—many people can. And those who moved to Las Vegas from parts of the country with deep economic problems tell their Las Vegas success story with a lot more spirit than I would. While young couples in cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco struggle to find ways to afford an entry-level home, my wife and I were able to partake of that piece of the American dream with relative ease.

From my experience, the public schools in Las Vegas get a bad rap. My two daughters attended local schools, and they had positive experiences. Their teachers ranged from good to excellent, and they all were enthusiastic and well-meaning. The school facilities were in good shape, and extracurricular activities were abundant. Las Vegas schools are underfunded and the teachers underpaid, but they don’t seem to crumble under the strain. My kids left the school system sufficiently prepared for university work.

But lest this book turn into a chamber of commerce-approved advertisement for Las Vegas, let’s turn to the negative aspects of living there, and there are plenty. For most of the period covered by this book, the over-arching issue was the double-edged sword of growth. While growth brought jobs and culture and money to the community, it also brought headaches. The roads were congested and constantly under construction. The air was dirty. The schools were crowded. The social safety net was full of holes. Historic landmarks and ecological havens were destroyed to make way for the new. The city at times felt chaotic, anarchic, a constant whirl of noises, frustrations and changes. It was difficult to get into a routine, because the environment was always changing. Very little of the city felt permanent, including the people. There was a severe shortage of community in Las Vegas, a young city where newcomers are reluctant to put down roots. Lasting friendships are prized because they are rare. Neighbors often don’t know each other. They tend to keep to themselves, saying hello at the mailbox and that’s about it.

The 2008 recession idled the bulldozers, but it was difficult to detect resulting improvements to the problems cited above. The city still bustled and rankled, with perhaps a greater degree of desperation in the air.

The lack of community connection or pride seems to breed aberrant and self-centered behavior—drivers who race through school zones, run red lights and cut off other motorists with impunity; the guy who revs his Harley in the middle of the night; the neighbor who operates a dangerous meth lab out of his garage. Incivility is hardly unique to Las Vegas, but the fact that so few people feel a connection to the place often is reflected in a more prevalent uncaring attitude. It also has social effects: While low voter turnout is a national problem, newer Las Vegans often seem less interested in politics and issues with which they have no history; contributions to local charities and the arts are meager; and interest in historic preservation, while growing, remains minimal. In the 2002 election, for example, Las Vegas area voters approved extra taxes for transportation projects but soundly defeated measures to help the homeless and expand the library system.

Name a modern social ill, and Las Vegas seems afflicted with a bad case. The rapid growth was a big reason. Politicians constantly struggled to find money to meet the ever-increasing demands for services and programs to properly care for the populace. The needs of one group were constantly balanced against those of another. In the process, the constituencies with the least political clout—the homeless, mentally ill, etc.—tended to get the crumbs left over after the powerful had taken their bites. The Nevada Legislature approved $836 million in tax increases in 2003—the largest tax increase in state history—and it barely kept pace with the demands of growth.

Urban critic James Howard Kunstler, from Sarasota Springs, New York, was perhaps Las Vegas’s toughest critic. His 2001 book The City in Mind contained a long rant against Las Vegas. They say that Antarctica is the worst place on Earth, Kunstler wrote, but I believe that distinction belongs to Las Vegas, hands down. Condemning those who suggested Las Vegas was a city of the future, Kunstler wrote: If Las Vegas truly is our city of the future, then we might as well all cut our own throats tomorrow. I certainly felt like cutting mine after only a few days there, so overwhelming was the sheer anomie provoked by every particular of its design and operation.

Kunstler was well-known for his hyperbolic style. But his attack on Las Vegas felt ill-informed and unfair. After all, Kunstler was most fond of Eastern and Midwestern prewar hamlets that preserved or adopted New Urbanist principles that encourage walking, foliage and a strong sense of place. Western cities grew within a different climate and a different time, making them difficult to compare with Kunstler’s ideal. Still, Kunstler’s comments were worth considering, in part because he was not alone. James Ellroy, whose 2001 novel The Cold Six Thousand was set partly in Las Vegas, went off on the city in a magazine interview: It’s a shit hole. It’s a testimony to greed and prostitution and exploitation of women and narcotics and the get-rich-quick fervor that is one of the worst aspects of America.

As the late UNLV history professor Hal Rothman said, Las Vegas is a hard town that will make you pay for your inability to restrain your desires. The twenty-four-hour lifestyle is an open invitation for alcohol and drug abuse, for promiscuity and compulsive gambling. Gambling addiction happens everywhere, especially with the proliferation of gambling around the world, but nowhere in America is the environment so rich for this devastating problem to flourish. What’s so troubling is that Las Vegas collectively does so little to help problem gamblers. While other states and cities with legalized gambling have made treatment and prevention programs a priority, the issue gets back-burner status in the gambling capital of the world.

Las Vegas, then, has its pros and cons, much like any city. Local writer Scott Dickensheets, in an article for Money magazine in 2002, said, Mixed feelings are practically a civic duty if you live in Las Vegas. Whether you like or dislike the place depends largely on what you consider important in life. But it’s never that simple. One might expect very religious people to dislike Sin City, with its morals-challenged mindset, but Las Vegas’s significant population of Mormons and fundamentalists calls that assumption into question. One might expect the city’s barren desert and extreme summer heat to be too much for natives of the lush Midwest and Northeast, but large numbers of the city’s recent emigrants hail from places like Michigan, Wisconsin and New York.

One thing is generally agreed upon: Unless you’re a diehard gambler or lounge lizard who can’t imagine being anyplace else, Las Vegas is an acquired taste. Before the recession, Las Vegas boasted that anywhere from 4,000 to 8,000 people move there every month. But almost half that many also left each month. Las Vegas is not for everyone, but over the past thirty years it has become steadily more attractive to a wider spectrum of people. Las Vegas matured from a frontier town to a modern metropolis. It added dimensions to everyday life that people have come to expect in a major city. That transformation is largely what this book is about.

I witnessed the rise of Las Vegas, and I witnessed the fall. And then I watched it all from a distance—for a while.

In the spring of 2011, I left Las Vegas. I didn’t flee, as some did when the recession hit, but I did end up in a greener pasture. I was offered a job opportunity that was impossible to pass up. After twenty-three years as a writer and editor in Las Vegas, I became the publisher of a group of newspapers based in Ames, Iowa.

After so many years enmeshed in the business, cultural and political spheres of Las Vegas, I had come to view the community as normal, or at least not as unusual as its reputation suggested. But after I had lived in the Midwest for a few months, I came to realize that Las Vegas is indeed unique. I came to see why people find the city so exciting—and so repugnant.

Some people I met in Iowa were frequent visitors to Las Vegas: for conventions, for a long weekend or to visit family members who had moved there. They tended to enjoy it—as a place to visit. It appealed to them because it’s so different from their everyday environment.

Other Iowans seemed to have absolutely no interest in Las Vegas. To them, Las Vegas is everything they abhor. It’s congested, noisy, full of hustlers, hookers and temptations they’d rather not deal with. They asked me questions, perhaps curious about whether the mob still lurks in the shadows, but they had no plans to pay a visit.

Most of the revised and expanded parts of this book were written in Iowa. At first I thought this might be a disadvantage, but it didn’t turn out that way. Rather, I believe moving 1,500 miles from my subject improved my sense of perspective. I would not presume to compare myself to great writers, but there’s a venerable tradition of writing well about places from a distance. Consider Ernest Hemingway, who wrote some of his finest short stories set in Upper Michigan while sitting in a Paris café. Salman Rushdie grew up in India but has lived primarily in England since college. His most-admired novels are set in India. Rushdie has said: The only people who see the whole picture are the ones who step out of the frame. At the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books in 2012, the novelist Steve Erickson remarked, I had to leave L.A. in my twenties and thirties in order to understand it. I hope this revised and expanded edition benefits, at least a little, from the perspective I gained from looking at Las Vegas from afar.

Alas, I returned to Las Vegas in early 2014, and I changed professions as well. After twenty-five years in the newspaper business, I became the director of content for the Mob Museum in downtown Las Vegas. Among other things, I’m the in-house historian, a position I relish and am humbled by on a daily basis. I have a great seat to observe how Las Vegas grows and reinvents itself again as we push more deeply into the twenty-first century.

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.

Reviews for Sun, Sin & Suburbia

[kd9_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Although this is a fairly concise work on the rise of Las Vegas from outpost to destination, it suffers from three problems. First, it is written in a fairly dry journalistic style. The fact based style is good for an educational tome, but too dry for casual reading. Secondly it is not as well reserched or edited as an "essential" book should be. A mistake in crediting J. W. Marriott in building a resort in Summerlin (it was orginally built by Regent Hotels and sold to the Marriott corporation), makes me distrust some of the other attributions in the book. There are also some mistakes in the prices for the sales of BLM land. But thirdly, it was written in 2003, at a time when Las Vegas was still booming. It is optimistic about the monorail, now seen as a tremendous public boondoggle that serves fewer riders every month. The author seemed to think that the building boom would never end, when there were already indications of the limits to boom building in Florida. In all the dismay about the price of housing in Las Vegas becoming less affordable, never did he mention the fact that investor flipping had a lot to do with the rise in prices. And when the investors started loosing money that there would be a lot of empty ghost towns in formally hot neighborhoods. It does give a good overview of the growth of Henderson and North Las Vegas, but overall was disappointing.