Who Named the Strip and When? | Las Vegas Advisor

Who first referenced Las Vegas Blvd. as “The Strip” and when?

Credit is given to a Los Angeles cop named Guy McAfee.

It wasn't Las Vegas Boulevard at the time, though. It was Highway 91, the dusty road that connected L.A and Las Vegas (and continued through Utah and Idaho all the way to the Canadian border at Sweetgrass, Montana). This was in the 1930s.

McAfee began his career as a firefighter in California before moving on to become head of the vice squad of the Los Angeles Police Department, where he became known as the "Al Capone of L.A.," thanks to his outside business interests, which extended to the saloon, casino, and brothel businesses, including an establishment named the Clover Club on Sunset Strip. When a new L.A. mayor cracked down on organized crime in the late '30s, McAfee relocated to Las Vegas, where he rapidly gained stakes in a number of casino properties.

One in particular, the Pair-O-Dice Club, was way out of town -- opposite the current location of the Peppermill restaurant. McAfee drove the dusty miles between his Pair-O-Dice 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.

Apparently, he referred to "the Strip" so often and to so many early Las Vegans that it caught on and it's known by that moniker today, more than 80 years later.

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Comments

O2bnVegas Nov-22-2020

kudos

Great question.  Great answer.  Thanks.

Candy

Luis Nov-22-2020

Great!!!

Now that's a great bit of historical info!!!, Iv'e allway been very intrested in Las Vegas History and that little bit of History made my day, thank you!!

CLIFFORD Nov-22-2020

Yeah!

EVEN A BLIND SQUIRREL WILL FIND A NUT ONCE IN A WHILE

Kenneth Mytinger Nov-22-2020

Ken

Thanks for that Deke.  I've always thought that the story was more complicated.

Pat Roach Nov-22-2020

AP R

"Yeah!
EVEN A BLIND SQUIRREL WILL FIND A NUT ONCE IN A WHILE"

What the hell is that (the above comment) supposed to mean?  It sounds dismissive.  If so, why?

Roy Furukawa Nov-22-2020

@Pat Roach

Agreed, it sounds dismissive. Makes me wonder if Clifford's last name is Clavin for that remark.

Jeff Nov-24-2020

root of the McAfee credit

The Guy McAfee credit comes from quote by his wife decades after the fact in an article about McAfee in The Nevadan, 2/23/1976:  

** Mrs. McAfee recalls that the area didn’t have a name and when someone asked him where it was he’d say, “‘It’s out there on the strip,’” meaning the highway. She said the reference was a carry-over from California. “The strip of road between Los Angeles and Hollywood didn’t have a name so that’s what it was called until it became known as the Sunset Strip. Others picked up the word and that’s how The Strip got its name.” ** 

Maybe she's correct that he did use this phrase, or maybe she's over-crediting her husband who died 16 years earlier. Either way, the "strip" phrase seems to have been adopted pretty quickly in 1946-1947. Sometimes it was used in quotes. "Strip 91" was also used in the local paper & mags into the mid 50s.

CLIFFORD Nov-25-2020

BLIND SQUIRREL

It just means that it is a super question that everyone will be interested in,plus a great answer, rather than a question with narrow appeal  that many questions of the day are

Question of the Day - 22 November 2020

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