Howard Hughes

Landmark Hotel

The off-Strip Landmark Hotel began as an unfinished attraction for a shopping center and became the last of six casinos owned by billionaire Howard Hughes. It would struggle to stay in business for decades until it was closed in 1990 and destroyed in 1995.

Harolds Club

On his twenty-fifth birthday, February 23, 1935, Harold Smith Sr. opened a tiny gambling club in Reno, Nevada. He had come to “the biggest little city” because California was cracking down on the carnival games his family ran in the Bay Area, and in 1931 Nevada had legalized gambling. Smith called his place “Harold's Club”—with an apostrophe—and it was to become one of the most famous gambling place of its day and one of the first modern casinos.

Flamingo Hotel

The opening of the Flamingo Hotel in late 1946 signaled the beginning of the modern era of Las Vegas hotel-casinos on Highway 91, later known as the Strip. The Flamingo set a new standard of luxury for hotel guests and became the first of many stylish casino resorts constructed on the Strip after World War II.

Desert Inn

Wilbur Clark was operating several bars and a hotel in San Diego, California in 1944 when he learned that the El Rancho Vegas hotel-casino on the emerging Las Vegas Strip was up for sale. Clark, who for years had his eye on running a casino, sold his interests and moved to Las Vegas.

Claudine B. Williams

Claudine Williams of Las Vegas was a trailblazer for women when men controlled Nevada's business world. She was the first woman in the state to head a major casino and the first to chair a financial institution. In later life, she became a leading community philanthropist with education and child welfare at the top of her list.

Castaways Hotel

The Castaways Hotel opened on the west side of the Las Vegas Strip across from the Sands Hotel in 1963, became one of the casinos billionaire Howard Hughes bought in the late 1960s and survived into the 1980s, when it was demolished to make way for Steve Wynn's The Mirage in 1989.

Billy Wilkerson

William R. "Billy" Wilkerson was the original developer of the Flamingo Hotel, considered by historians the most important and influential resort to open on the fledgling Las Vegas Strip in the 1940s. The importance of his role, however, is often overshadowed in popular history by a partner in the project, the gangster Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel.

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