Question of the Day - 07 November 2023

As a matter of fact we do know and it wasn't on the Strip.  

As you can easily imagine, that distinction belongs to Fremont Street, the original hub of Las Vegas back when "the Strip" was just plain old Highway 91, a two-lane dirt track frequented more by tumbleweed than vehicular traffic.

Downtown Las Vegas, indeed, claims a number of technological "firsts." 

The first of them occurred in 1907, when Las Vegas' first telephone was installed at the Hotel Nevada, now the Golden Gate. Then, in 1925, Fremont became the first street in Las Vegas to be paved -- at first just between Main and 5th.

In 1931, the year of both the legalization of gambling and the start of construction on Hoover Dam, Fremont Street really started to rock, as the city's population increased fivefold virtually overnight, from around 5,000 to 25,000. Electricity from the new dam powered the lights that gave the street its nickname of Glitter Gulch.

The following year, Las Vegas' first elevator was installed, at the new 100-room Apache Hotel and Casino (now the oldest part of Binion's). Some years later, Binion's Horseshoe, which swallowed the Apache whole, was the first casino to install carpet.

Neon, air conditioning, the town's first radio station and movie theater -- they all happened on Fremont Street.

Las Vegas received its very first traffic light on August 9, 1941, at the corner of Fremont and Fifth Street, installed a few months before the El Cortez opened. You can see a photo of it on VintageLasVegas and read some text from the Las Vegas Review-Journal about drivers running the light due to "considerable confusion" when it first went into operation.

The first traffic light on the Strip arrived some 20 years later. Here's the story, courtesy of an excerpt from our great old book, Fly on the Wall Recollections of Las Vegas' Good Old, Bad Old Days. by Dick Odessky.

"I remember the long hard fight that Jack Cortez, publisher of Las Vegas' first weekly entertainment magazine, Fabulous Las Vegas, waged to get the first traffic light installed on the Strip. It was around 1960 and Cortez used his magazine, which was placed in every hotel room in town, to climb onto this soap box and demand a traffic signal at the intersection of the Strip and what was then known as Fulcher Road. At the same time, the original Convention Center was under construction at the intersection of Fulcher and Paradise roads and Cortez thought it was critical to have some traffic safety at that spot as well. He made innumerable appearances before the County Commission to plead his case.

"The Commissioners finally threw Jack a bone and installed a stop sign at the barren intersection, recently paved, that fronted the Convention Center. Heartened by that success, Cortez redoubled his efforts for traffic control at his pet intersection, which, he rightfully realized, was the virtual center of the Strip with an equal number of major businesses north and south of the corner. He made regular appearances before the County Commissioners, the Planning Board, and any other board that would listen to him. He presented all sorts of elaborate graphs and charts, plus statistics and other numbers (which were never attributed to anyone), enumerating pedestrian and vehicular accident and incident reports.

"On the opposing side were all the hotel owners and operators along the Strip who didn't want their thoroughfare saddled with electric traffic control. Some owners even suggested they'd fade the expense of hiring a private traffic cop to be stationed at this one intersection whenever needed. But the whole thing fell apart when the backers presented some drawings to the commissioners showing a stand from which the cop would direct traffic. The big box was covered with casino advertising, which would be sold to pay the traffic director's salary.

"At one County Commission meeting, a little old lady, supposedly from Arizona, asked if she might say a few words that she felt were important for the commissioners to hear. The woman launched into a tirade about how close she'd come to being hit by a car that was speeding down the Strip at 70 miles per hour as she and her poor old husband tried to cross in front of the Stardust. She harangued the commissioners about a traffic light at that intersection for a full 15 minutes, with Jack Cortez providing the Greek chorus: 'The poor lady!' 'Her poor husband!' 'You tell 'em!' And 'Amen' to that!'"

It took Cortez several more years to win his case, but when the commissioners finally relented, he made sure to turn his big day into a major celebration, with a big parade to celebrate the Strip's first traffic light. And once the signal was turned on and casino owners saw how all the traffic was stopping right outside the Stardust, petitions started flooding in from everyone else wanting a red stop light outside their properties too."