In the early 1930s, as the nation’s banks were falling like dominoes, the dam was rising block by block.
Meanwhile, state lawmakers in Carson City passed a typically Nevadan version of the New Deal -- front-running, nonconformist, and permissive. Wide-open gambling was legalized in 1931 and the residency requirement to be eligible for a Nevada divorce was reduced to an unheard-of six weeks. Combined with unimpeded bootlegging, legal prostitution, championship boxing matches, and no-wait marriages, Nevada was now the only state in the union to spurn the moral backlash that followed the Roaring Twenties. Vice-starved visitors and hopeful dam workers flooded southern Nevada, thereby transforming Las Vegas from a dusty railroad stopover into a bright spot on the gloomy horizon of the Great Depression.
Downtown, bars finally moved from the shadows of Block 16 right into the bright lights of Fremont Street; the Northern, Silver, and Tango clubs received Las Vegas’ first gambling licenses. In 1935, 5,000 Shriners from southern California inaugurated Las Vegas as a convention town.
The dam, when completed in 1935, was 726 feet tall, 660 feet thick at the base, and nearly a quarter-mile long at the crest -- the sum total of more than three million cubic yards of concrete. At its peak, the dam employed 5,000 workers and Las Vegas’ permanent population increased by 50% to 7,500, with transients and visitors further swelling the ranks. The local infrastructure underwent continuous improvement. Housing construction boomed. Congress appropriated millions for a new post office, federal building, and general relief. Business prospered. Urbanization accelerated.
"Dateline Las Vegas" became a staple of newsreel and newsprint and thousands of tourists arrived, many by automobile, to enjoy the spectacle of the dam and the Wild West boomtown nearby.
Las Vegas in the late 1930s also received its first wave of outside illegal gambling operators, mostly small-time independent bosses from Los Angeles. With their experience and expertise, these operators immediately gained respectability within the budding legal casino business and helped improve not only its management, but its image as well.
The onset of World War II renewed federal spending in southern Nevada. In 1940, with the population of 8,500, city officials teamed up with the Civil Aeronautics Agency and the Army Air Corps to develop a million-acre training facility for pilots, bombardiers, and gunners. Over the next five years, the Las Vegas Aerial Gunnery School trained thousands of military personnel; during that time, the facility expanded to three million acres.
In 1942, a monster metal-processing plant, Basic Magnesium Inc., was constructed halfway between Las Vegas and Hoover Dam. At its peak in 1944, BMI employed 10,000 factory workers, many of whom lived in housing projects at the new town site of Henderson.
Thanks to the dam, the gunnery school, and the magnesium factory, the Las Vegas area finally had the power to accommodate large-scale industry, the influence to attract massive infusions of federal capital, and the magic to lure tens of thousands of vacationers.
All it needed was a good hotel.
Guy McAfee, an L.A. casino boss who opened the Pair-o-Dice Club several miles south of downtown on Highway 91, the road to Los Angeles, drove the miles between his roadhouse and Fremont Street so often that he began referring to the stretch of road as "the Strip," after the beloved Sunset Strip of his hometown. Another southern Californian, Thomas Hull, followed the Pair-o-Dice’s lead and, in April 1941, opened the El Rancho Vegas, a 65-room bungalow-style motor inn complete with casino, steakhouse, showroom, shops, and swimming pool, just outside the city limits on Highway 91. Business boomed from the beginning and Hull quickly expanded the hotel to 125 rooms.
A year later, the Last Frontier opened a mile south of the El Rancho Vegas, with a 107-room motel, casino, restaurants, and lounges, along with the Last Frontier Village, a small town site filled with tons of Western artifacts. Without doubt, the Last Frontier was Las Vegas’ first combined casino, resort, and tourist attraction and it inaugurated a tradition of one-upmanship that hasn’t changed over the course of more than 60 years and the building of a couple dozen of the largest hotels in the world.
By 1943, Las Vegas’ population had exploded to 35,000.
In 1946, the Fabulous Flamingo, as conceived and commenced by Billy Wilkerson and completed by Bugsy Siegel, opened. Siegel, the notorious co-founder of Murder Inc., paved the way for the Las Vegas casino business to be infiltrated by the national organized-crime syndicate. In 1948, the Thunderbird opened on the east side of the Strip down from the El Rancho Vegas; it was owned in part by the other founder of Murder Inc., Meyer Lansky.
The stage was now set for more than 20 years of gangster angst in Las Vegas, which is tomorrow’s episode.
