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Who founded Las Vegas? Myth vs Reality
If you would conduct a survey among the millions of people that visit
the Las Vegas Strip yearly, and asked the simple question "Who
founded Las Vegas?", we would bet that 90 percent of those people
would answer: "Bugsy Siegel of course". If you asked the
same people "Which casino was the first Las Vegas Strip casino?",
probably more than 90 percent would answer "Easy. The Flamingo".
The Las Vegas Myth
The Las Vegas Myth says that Bugsy Siegel, one of the most violent
gangsters in his lifetime and beyond, founded the Las Vegas Strip
by building the first casino, the Flamingo, along Highway 91, the
highway through the Mojave desert, connecting Las Vegas with Los Angeles.
Bugsy Siegel, we are told, was a tough and often vicious guy, who
lived to build his one great idea, an oasis of splendor and gambling
in the middle of a desert. And eventually he was killed for it by
his gangster "friends", at the same time his "invention",
the Flamingo, started to make a profit.
This myth was popularized by many casino operators, historians
and films, including in particular "The Godfather". But
is it true? We're afraid it's not. The Flamingo was *not* the first
casino on the Las Vegas Strip, and it was also *not* the invention
of Bugsy Siegel.
The Las Vegas Myth debunked
The first casino on the Vegas Strip was not "Bugsy Siegel's"
Flamingo, but rather "El Rancho Vegas", a casino that was
opened five years earlier by Thomas Hull in 1941. El Rancho Vegas
was a casino with a new frontier Western theme. In that respect it
was certainly not unique. Many Las Vegas City casinos were themed
along similar lines. However, El Rancho Vegas *was* a revolution for
two reasons.
Firstly, it was the first casino to be located on Highway 91, known
today as the "Las Vegas Strip". Secondly, El Rancho Vegas
was the prototype of the modern casino resort, with it's emphasis
on the idea to fulfill all of it's customer's needs on the casino
premises (and keep people near the gambling tables!). El Rancho
Vegas featured not just a casino, but also a travel agency, shops,
night-clubs, steakhouses and a swimming pool. A visit to El Rancho
Vegas was a complete vacation, and customers didn't have a reason
to venture outside of the casino complex.
So if Bugsy Siegel didn't create the first Vegas Strip casino,
could he still be labeled as the "inventor of Las Vegas"
for masterminding the Flamingo, the first casino on the Las Vegas
strip that was truly successful?
Again, we're afraid nothing could be further away from the truth.
The vision of superimposing Beverly Hills upon the Mojave desert,
was masterminded by Billy Wilkerson, founder of the "Hollywood
reporter" and a compulsive gambler. Wilkerson employed architect
George Russell and decorator Tom Douglas, to design his casino,
the Flamingo, as he envisioned it, an extravagant casino modeled
on the Beverly Hills Hotel and Paris' Moulin Rouge, catering to
the needs of California's rich and famous.
As Wilkerson's capital soon proved to be insufficient to make his
dream come true, he turned to investors of a more dubious nature,
i.e. criminal syndicates. It was Bugsy Siegel who represented the
investors of these criminal syndicates, who in the end not just
invested in the project but took control of it. Thus, Bugsy Siegel
is *not* the inventor of Las Vegas, but it's Billy Wilkerson. Bugsy
Siegel merely took control of Wilkerson's project, and by some strange
twist of history takes all the credits for Wilkerson's invention.
This article was partly based on chapter 2 -
The Unwholesome Allure - of the great book "Suburban Xanadu",
written by David G. Schwartz, currently the coordinator of the Gaming
Studies Research Center at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
More information can be found here.
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