Frommer's Las Vegas 2004

A LOOK AT THE PAST 295
While the Strip was expanding, Downtown kept pace with new hotels such
as the El Cortez and the Golden Nugget. By the end of the decade, Fremont
Street was known as “Glitter Gulch,” its profusion of neon signs proclaiming
round-the-clock gaming and entertainment.
THE 1950S: BUILDING BOOMS & A-BOMBS
Las Vegas entered the new decade as a city (no longer a frontier town) with a
population of about 50,000. Hotel growth was phenomenal. The Desert Inn,
which opened in 1950 with headliners Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy,
brought country-club elegance (including an 18-hole golf course and tennis
courts) to the Strip.
In 1951 the Eldorado Club Downtown became Benny Binion’s Horseshoe
Club, which would gain fame as the home of the annual World Series of Poker.
In 1954 the Showboat sailed into a new area east of Downtown. The Showboat
not only introduced buffet meals, but it also offered round-the-clock bingo and
a bowling alley (106 lanes to date).
In 1955 the Côte d’Azur–themed Riviera became the ninth big hotel to open
on the Strip. Breaking the ranch-style mode, it was, at nine stories, the Strip’s
first high-rise. Liberace, one of the hottest names in show business, was paid the
unprecedented sum of $50,000 a week to dazzle audiences in The Riviera’s posh
Clover Room.
Elvis appeared at the New Frontier in 1956 but wasn’t a huge success; his fans
were too young to fit the Las Vegas tourist mold. In 1958 the $10 million,
1,065-room Stardust upped the spectacular stakes by importing the famed Lido
de Paris spectacle from the French capital. It became one of the longest-running
shows ever to play Las Vegas.
Throughout the 1950s, most of the Vegas hotels competed for performers
whose followers spent freely in the casinos. The advent of big-name Strip entertainment
tolled a death knell for glamorous nightclubs in America; owners simply
could not compete with the astronomical salaries paid to Las Vegas
headliners. Two performers whose names have been linked to Las Vegas ever
since—Frank Sinatra and Wayne Newton—made their debuts there. Mae West
not only performed in Las Vegas, but also cleverly bought up 1 ⁄2 mile of desolate
Strip frontage between the Dunes and the Tropicana.
Competition for the tourist dollar also brought nationally televised sporting
events such as the PGA’s Tournament of Champions. In the 1950s the wedding
industry helped make Las Vegas one of the nation’s most popular venues for
“goin’ to the chapel.” Celebrity weddings of the 1950s that sparked the trend
included singer Dick Haymes and Rita Hayworth, Joan Crawford and Pepsi
chairman Alfred Steele, Carol Channing and TV exec Charles Lowe, and Paul
Newman and Joanne Woodward.
On a grimmer note, the ’50s also heralded the atomic age in Nevada, with
nuclear testing taking place just 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. A chilling
1951 photograph shows a mushroom-shaped cloud from an atomic bomb test
visible over the Fremont Street horizon. Throughout the decade, about one
bomb a month was detonated in the nearby desert (an event, interestingly
enough, that often attracted loads of tourists).
THE 1960S: THE RAT PACK & A PACK RAT
The very first month of the new decade made entertainment history when the
Sands hosted a 3-week “Summit Meeting” in the Copa Room that was presided
over by “Chairman of the Board” Frank Sinatra with Rat Pack cronies Dean