Question of the Day - 01 May 2017

Sometimes we get a question that stumps even the experts and that’s the case with this one. None of the historians, old-timers, or researchers we queried could come up with an answer.

“It is the most frustrating street I’ve been researching,” says Mark Hall Patton of the Clark County Museum and author of Asphalt Memories. “And I’ve gotten quite a few enquiries.”

So it must be a popular topic of speculation.

What Hall Patton does know is that it was initially laid out and paved in 1942 as part of a subdivision, starting a few blocks north of Charleston Avenue and continuing for a half-mile to a mile south. It was then interdicted by several small ranches and became a dirt road.

The main event in the life of Maryland Parkway came in the mid-1950s when state regents acquired land for an expansion of the university from Reno to Las Vegas and selected an 80-acre parcel with the two-lane dirt road, known grandiosely as Maryland Parkway, as the eastern boundary. As the school that eventually turned into UNLV grew, so did the neighborhood and the thoroughfare. (The first classes on the new campus were held on September 10, 1957.)

Another major event was the opening of what’s now called the Boulevard Mall for the southeast corner of Maryland Parkway and Desert Inn Road, but back then was named the Parkway Mall. Local developers announced the location in 1963; the mall cost $1.25 million, opened in March 1968, and was the first enclosed, climate-controlled shopping center in Nevada.

The mall immediately stole shoppers from downtown and the Commercial Center on E. Sahara and the neighborhood grew. Over the ensuing decades, Maryland Parkway became a vital east-side north-south corridor connecting McCarran International Airport, UNLV, Boulevard Mall, Sunrise Hospital, and downtown.

But the area began to decline as suburbia expanded outward from the university and mall and today, the corridor is long overdue for redevelopment, including improved transportation infrastructure, a visual makeover, pedestrian-friendly walkways, and an overall infusion of new life.

Before the recession, a “Midtown UNLV” project was proposed that aimed to turn the area around UNLV into a thriving cultural hub, but since then, most of that attention has been directed at downtown. Perhaps it’s Maryland Parkway’s turn.

Still, no one seems to know how the road got its name.