How Vegas became Vegas

For decades the Strip slowly strangled downtown Las Vegas, until the old town fought back with an audacious idea: roof over Fremont Street itself and turn the sky into a show.

Before he reinvented the Strip with volcanoes and pirate ships, Steve Wynn was a thirty something outsider who bought into a tired downtown casino and turned it into a launchpad for an empire.

A forty foot cowboy with a waving arm and a smoking cigarette stood over Fremont Street and welcomed the world to Las Vegas, becoming the friendly neon face of a town built on light.

A Texas bootlegger with a murder rap behind him walked into downtown Las Vegas, raised the betting limits sky high, and turned a private high stakes duel into the championship of the entire game.

Before the Strip, before the neon, there was a hotel on the corner of Fremont and Main and a chilled glass of shrimp that fed a city for half a century at the price of a phone call.

The mobster who did not invent the Strip, but became the legend everyone tells anyway. Here is the real story of the Flamingo.

Eleven names in a binder gave the state of Nevada a weapon the mob never saw coming: a way to bar a man from every casino floor in the state without ever charging him with a crime.

He was the greatest gambling mind the mob ever had, running the Stardust and three other casinos at once. He just could not legally run any of them, and that contradiction blew up in spectacular fashion.

The Chicago Outfit sent Tony Spilotro to Las Vegas to quietly guard its interests. Instead he turned into a one-man crime wave so reckless he brought the heat that helped end the whole mob era.

The real Vegas heist was not pulled off at a table or a vault. It happened in the count room, in plain sight, where mob couriers walked out with suitcases of cash the IRS would never even know existed.

Before Bugsy, before the neon, before the Strip was even called the Strip, a Western-themed motel with a windmill out front quietly invented the whole formula on an empty stretch of desert highway.

For a few weeks in 1960, Sinatra and his friends filmed a movie by day and owned the Copa Room by night. It was the coolest Vegas ever got.

A teenager with a high, strange voice talked his way into a two-week lounge gig in 1959. He never really left. Over the decades, Wayne Newton played Las Vegas so many thousands of times that the town gave him a title nobody else could claim: Mr. Las Vegas.

He could fill any showroom on the Strip. He could not sleep in any of the hotels. Sammy Davis Jr. lived the cruelest contradiction in Las Vegas, the biggest draw in the room who was thrown out the back door, and he spent years refusing to accept it.

For a few electric months in 1955, the hottest room in Las Vegas was not on the Strip. It was the first racially integrated casino hotel in the city, and after the headliners on the Strip finished their own shows, they drove across town to play there until dawn.

A classically trained pianist from Wisconsin walked onto a Las Vegas stage in a tuxedo that flashed in the spotlights and decided the music was only half the job. The other half was the show. He invented the template the whole city would steal.

In 1956, Las Vegas chewed Elvis Presley up and spat him out. Thirteen years later he walked back into the biggest showroom in the world to settle the score, and what happened over those four weeks rewired what a Vegas residency could even be.

For about a decade, the hottest show in town was a mushroom cloud on the horizon. Vegas turned nuclear tests into a tourist attraction.

The federal government turned the desert next door into a nuclear proving ground, and Las Vegas grew rich on it.

A showgirl in a mushroom-cloud swimsuit, smiling, while real bombs lit up the desert sixty miles away.

Behind a fence in the desert lie the giant dead signs of every Las Vegas that no longer exists.

She designed the most recognized sign on the planet, then refused to own a single piece of it.

Jay Sarno's second casino put trapeze artists over the gambling floor and let kids wander a midway upstairs. Critics called it a circus in the worst way. Then a new owner turned the mess into a money machine and reinvented who Las Vegas was for.

On a November morning in 1980, a small electrical fire in a Strip deli became the deadliest disaster in Nevada history. Most of the 85 who died never saw a flame. They died from smoke, far above the fire, in a building everyone believed was safe.

Jay Sarno built a casino where everyone got to feel like an emperor. Then a daredevil tried to fly a motorcycle over its fountains, and the crash that nearly killed him made the place world famous.

He built the largest hotel in the world, sold it, and then did it again, twice.

A billionaire checked into a hotel, would not check out, and ended up buying half of Las Vegas to settle it.

A volcano, a pile of junk bonds, and a string of implosions. The story of how the modern Strip replaced the mob's Vegas.

The volcano erupted one last time, the white tigers were long gone, and the hotel that invented modern Las Vegas turned out its lights for good in July 2024.

Most cities mourn the buildings they lose. Vegas sold tickets, launched fireworks, and turned demolition into one of the biggest free shows on the planet.

For one wild decade, Las Vegas tried to become a giant theme park. A black glass pyramid, a medieval castle, a fake New York skyline, a pirate battle every night. The 1990s gave the Strip its most outrageous decade, and then quietly walked most of it back.

Two German entertainers and their white tigers became the highest-grossing act in Las Vegas history. Then on a October night in 2003, in front of a sold-out crowd, one of the tigers took Roy by the neck and the most famous show on the Strip ended in an instant.

Steve Wynn spent over a billion dollars to build a casino around a lake, hang real Picassos on the walls, and make grown adults stop and watch water dance. It worked, and it changed what a Las Vegas resort was allowed to be.