🎰 A History of Las Vegas

Las Vegas is Spanish for "the meadows". The name sounds like a joke today, but it was descriptive: in the middle of the Mojave desert there were springs, and grass grew around them. That is exactly why a road came this way, and exactly why a city stands here now.

The springs, incidentally, dried up. They were pumped out by wells in the twentieth century. The city stayed behind.

A Meadow, a Mission and a Railway

The name was given to the place around 1829 by a scout with a Spanish-speaking expedition looking for a short cut from Santa Fe to California. A meadow with water in the middle of a desert was the most valuable thing such a route could find.

In 1855 the Mormon church in Utah sent a mission here to build a fort and teach the local Paiute to farm. They lasted two years. A piece of that adobe fort still stands and is one of the oldest buildings in Nevada.

The real town came into being on 15 May 1905, in a single day. The railway from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles needed a watering stop between the mountains and held a land auction here. In one hot day over a thousand plots were sold. That is the date Las Vegas is counted from.

1931: Gambling and a Dam

Two things have no competition in the city's history, and both fall in 1931.

First, Nevada legalised gambling. It was not a plan for a tourist paradise; it was a desperate move by a state that was broke in the Depression and needed the tax. At the same time Nevada cut the residency required for a divorce to six weeks, so people began coming for that as well.

Second, fifty kilometres from here, work began on the Hoover Dam. Twenty thousand workers arrived with their families and suddenly there was a market. The dam was finished in five years, two years early, and incidentally still generates power. Boulder City was built for the workers, and gambling was banned in it — and still is, as the only place in the whole of Nevada.

Why the Strip Is Not in Las Vegas

In 1941 the first big resort with a pool and a casino was built by the road south of town. It stood outside the city on purpose: beyond the boundary the taxes were lower and the city ordinances did not apply.

Everything else followed it. That is why the Strip — the street of hotels the whole world knows — formally does not lie in Las Vegas at all. It lies in the county townships of Paradise and Winchester, which have no town halls of their own.

In 1946 the Flamingo opened here, behind which stood east-coast underworld money and the gangster Benjamin Siegel. The opening was a disaster, the hotel lost money, and Siegel was shot dead six months later in a living room in Beverly Hills. The Flamingo nevertheless became the template: casino, hotel, pool and a star on stage, all under one roof.

The mob then largely financed and ran Vegas until the seventies. What changed it was a state decision in 1969 allowing casinos to be owned by joint-stock companies. Until then the owner had to be a named person with a vetted past, which suited precisely the people it was meant not to suit.

Atomic Tourism

A hundred kilometres north-west of the city lay a nuclear test site from 1951. Over nine hundred nuclear tests were carried out there up to 1992, about a hundred of them in the air.

The mushroom cloud was visible from downtown Las Vegas. The city did not treat this as a problem but as an attraction: the chamber of commerce printed calendars of the detonations, hotels held rooftop breakfasts, bars mixed an "atomic cocktail", and in 1957 the locals crowned a Miss Atomic Bomb — a dancer in a swimsuit shaped like an explosion.

Today it sounds unbelievable and it is documented in photographs. The health consequences for the people downwind were discussed only much later.

Elvis, Implosions and Megaresorts

In 1969 Elvis Presley returned to the stage in a hotel here after eight years of making nothing but films. He then played over six hundred sold-out shows, and with that Vegas became, for a long time, the place American stars go to stay rather than to stop.

In 1989 a hotel opened with an artificial volcano at the entrance and white tigers inside, and it started the age of the megaresort. It had to take over a million dollars a day simply not to be losing money, and it took more.

The nineties then looked like this: old hotels were blown up to applause and copies of foreign cities went up in their place. A pyramid with a beam of light, the New York skyline with a roller coaster, Venice with gondolas and a canal on the first floor, Paris with half an Eiffel Tower, a lake with fountains that dance to music.

This is the point at which to say that Vegas has never had any illusions about it. A copy is a copy and everybody knows it. That is exactly why it works.

Vegas Today

Around two and three quarter million people live in the metropolitan area and over forty million visitors come each year. There are about a hundred and fifty thousand hotel rooms, more than in any other American city.

The beam of light from the pyramid is one of the strongest in the world. On a good night it can be seen from an aircraft over four hundred kilometres away. It attracts moths, the moths attract bats, and a small food chain has grown up above the hotel that would not exist without the casino.

In 2023 the Sphere opened by the Strip — a ball over a hundred metres tall whose entire outer surface is a screen. It is the largest LED surface in the world and the most expensive entertainment building ever put up in Nevada.

The city also has a problem the brochures leave out: water. It takes it from Lake Mead behind the Hoover Dam, and that lake has been falling since 2000. Vegas has responded more strictly than most American cities — it recycles practically all the water used indoors, and since 2021 it has banned ornamental grass that nobody uses. The fountains in front of the hotel are recycled and draw on their own well rather than the mains; they are pools nobody empties.

And two more figures. Around eighty thousand marriages are performed in Vegas every year, because there is no waiting and nothing to prove. And on 1 October 2017 sixty people died here in a shooting at a music festival — the worst mass shooting in modern United States history. The city has a memorial to it and does not speak of it as an attraction.

Las Vegas came into being because there was water in the desert, and it grew because it was allowed what was not allowed elsewhere. Both are gone — the water nearly, and the exclusive right to gambling entirely, because betting is possible almost everywhere now. Vegas keeps growing anyway. By then it is selling something else: it does not matter what is legal here, here it can be done bigger.