The Green Shack is fondly remembered by a lot of people who came to Las Vegas before 1999.
For 70 years or so, the Green Shack was more than a restaurant. Even in the early years, it was an institution. Movers and shakers, wheelers and dealers, judges and lawyers, cops and hookers, gangsters, dam workers, historic preservationists, civic organizations, high schoolers on prom night, savvy tourists -- just about anyone who knew anything about Las Vegas wound up at the Green Shack at one time or another. Bugsy ate there. Frank, Dino, and Sammy ate there. Liberace and Elvis ate there. Even Kilroy probably ate there (though whether he slept there is unknown). It was, without a doubt, the longest-lived restaurant in Las Vegas; it'll take the next oldest restaurant, the El Sombrero, another 15 years to overtake it.
Mattie (or Mettie, depending on the source) Jones arrived in Las Vegas in 1929 following the death of her husband; whatever her real name was, everyone called her "Jimmie." She and her mother Effie moved into a two-room house off Fremont Street downtown, where they served fried chicken (and bootleg whiskey) from a window off the kitchen. The "restaurant" was known as the Colorado.
Pretty soon, the Colorado's fried chicken was renowned in the valley. Also, Fremont Street was widened to handle Boulder (now Hoover) Dam construction traffic. So in 1932, Jimmie Jones bought an old barracks from the Union Pacific Railroad and had it hauled by tractor down Fremont Street to what was starting to become known as the Boulder Highway. The barracks was green. It was a shack. Jimmie Jones took one look at her green shack on Boulder Highway and named it the Green Shack.
The barracks served as the main dining room. A cocktail lounge and a small gambling hall were added on a few years later. Jimmie Jones's nephew Frank McCormick oversaw the bar and casino.
When the Showboat Hotel-Casino opened a block away in 1954, the Green Shack had already been there for more than 20 years.
Frank McCormick's son Jim was born in 1939 and grew up in the Green Shack. He, and later his wife Barbara, took it over and kept it alive. In 1994, the Green Shack was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The original barracks continued to serve as the dining room, and by then, the restaurant was a little rough around the edges; so was the neighborhood. Business dwindled as the Green Shack became more and more overshadowed by glitzy new eateries inside and out of the megaresorts. Finally, it closed in May 1999.
Still, it's amazing to think that the Green Shack was not only the oldest continuously operating restaurant in Las Vegas, but it was at the same location, in the same building, and owned by the same family the entire time.
(The El Sombrero, actually, is in a position to catch and pass it with the same three claims; see QoD 8/29/06).
