Growth of Gaming Clubs in Las Vegas
In addition to the contrived sense of history derived from period architecture in Las Vegas, an even more fundamental attachment to the past persisted in the burgeoning city.
Almost all new wartime business was centered downtown in the original forty-block town site adjacent to the Union Pacific depot.
The gaming clubs of Las Vegas, decked out in the fashion of the old West and elevated to paramount status in the resort town, were mostly located within walking distance of the train station and stockyards.
The centripetal railroad town had merged fully with the last frontier. The convergence of the two designs was ill-fated because it occurred at the same time that gambling became the overriding factor in local development.
The imperatives of the gaming industry rapidly came to control the shaping forces in Las Vegas.
Just as in architecture and promotion, the city's function as America's twentieth-century gambling capital required an urban form that was more diverse than the nineteenth-century shapes of the railroad and old West could provide.
Yet even though railroad town and last frontier had begun to give way to the complexly formed urban resort of the postwar era, they combined in the early 1940s, at the first blossom of urbanization, to lend Las Vegas a cohesion in geography and architecture that it would never regain.
Railroad town and last frontier endured in Las Vegas in the guise of downtown casinos, centers of betting that survived the demise of the old tourist stop.
The downtown casino, another new form in the culture of gambling indigenous to the American West, captured the past of the frontier as well as the future as portended by Southern California.
It represented the grafting of new ways on to traditional practices of gaming in southern Nevada, and it gave the central district a distinct identity.
Like the clubs of the 1930s, these new establishment lay close to the train depot and featured western styles architecture and decor.
In location and design, they perpetuated attachments to yesterday. In addition, most downtown casinos were not connected to hotels. Overnight tourists generally stayed either at separate downtown motels or in the many motor courts that lined highways leading into the center of town.
The heyday of the resort hotel, another cultural form that coupled casinos with hotels on the same grounds, had not yet arrived.
At the same time that downtown casinos preserved Las Vegas traditions, however, they also illuminated the direction of change.
The new establishments were no longer called clubs nor regarded as small or petty, for they had expanded substantially in order to accommodate the increased trade.
Moreover, they were now given over almost entirely to the business of gambling. The clubs of the 1930s had evolved from late nineteenth-century saloons where betting had to compete against liquor for the customer's attention.
Now gambling became the uppermost attraction in downtown establishments, much as it had prevailed in the early gaming halls around the plaza in Gold Rush San Francisco, while the bar and the old West decor merely contributed to a setting conducive to gambling.