Michael Green

Sands Hotel Implosion

Las Vegas has developed a reputation for imploding its past. Actually, the reputation is neither deserved nor unique. Other cities have blown up historic buildings whose owners or the community had decided had outlived their usefulness—Reno’s Mapes Hotel serving as an example. And Las Vegas has imploded mainly hotel-casinos in financial trouble or unlikely to compete with newer, more modern, larger resorts. What Las Vegas has done differently, though, is turn these implosions into spectacles.

Stardust Hotel Implosion

Las Vegas has developed a reputation for imploding its past. Actually, the reputation is neither deserved nor unique. Other cities have blown up historic buildings whose owners or the community had decided had outlived their usefulness—Reno’s Mapes Hotel serving as an example. And Las Vegas has imploded mainly hotel-casinos in financial trouble or unlikely to compete with newer, more modern, larger resorts. What Las Vegas has done differently, though, is turn these implosions into spectacles.

Ruthe Deskin

A native Nevadan who bridged the old and new in the state's history, Ruthe Deskin was an influential Las Vegas journalist for almost half a century. She was born in Yerington (which she insisted on calling by its original name, Pizen Switch) to Jim Goldsworthy, a mining engineer, and Viola West, of a Mason Valley pioneer family.

Plaza Hotel

[VR Morph by Howard Goldbaum]

The construction of the Union Plaza Hotel-Casino, now the Plaza Hotel, was a turning point for downtown Las Vegas. It replaced the Union Pacific Railroad depot, built in 1940, and the park just east of it. It signified how downtown Las Vegas was changing and touched off a long-term redevelopment effort that continues today.

Players on the Strip

The Las Vegas Strip of the 1940s and 1950s epitomized its times. Hollywood was peaking and television was entering every household, and Las Vegas enjoyed close ties to Los Angeles and Hollywood. Highway 91 provided the majority of visitors from Los Angeles, and Hollywood stars were frequent visitors and performers. Just as Walt Disney capitalized on the media and catered to fantasy by opening Disneyland in 1955, Las Vegas hotels offered their own fantasyland of luxury and the chance to rub elbows with the famous and beautiful.

Pioneer Club

Las Vegas has its share of icons, but few are better known or longer lasting than "Vegas Vic," the huge neon-lit cowboy figure that has greeted visitors for many decades. Although he has been part of downtown for more than half a century, the casino he towers over predates him.

National Influence of Nevada

Nevada has almost always ranked near the bottom in state population, yet its leaders in Washington often have been among the nation's most powerful.

That might seem contradictory. But the key reason has been the United States Senate. Like most legislative bodies, it long has operated on the seniority system: the longer a senator serves, the likelier he or she will chair a committee, especially a powerful one like Appropriations, which doles out federal funds, or Judiciary, which considers some of the president's most important appointments.

Moulin Rouge

The first integrated hotel-casino in Las Vegas, the Moulin Rouge, opened on May 24, 1955 on West Bonanza Road, at the edge of West Las Vegas, the town's segregated area. Owned almost wholly by whites and intended to compete with whites-only resorts on the Strip and downtown, it originally attracted comparatively few African Americans, who resented the idea of a segregated casino.

Morris Barney Dalitz

Morris Barney Dalitz was born on December 24, 1899, in Boston, Massachusetts, and raised in Michigan, where his father operated a growing laundry business. When prohibition begin in 1919, bootleggers needed delivery mechanisms, and Dalitz's access to laundry trucks helped him enter that business.

Valley Times

In a storied journalism history that includes Mark Twain and Dan De Quille, national figures such as Hank Greenspun, and renowned newspapers like Virginia City's Territorial Enterprise, the Valley Times has a place among Nevada's most controversial and important newspapers.

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