Reno Las Vegas And The Strip

Eugene P. Moehring analyzes the development of Reno and Las Vegas since 1945 with special emphasis on the years after 1970. Major factors that shaped the development of both cities were the growth of corporate gaming and megaresorts and increased personal leisure and affluence. Moehring provides an engaging, informative, and readable history of the divergent paths that Reno and Las Vegas took over the past forty years. Reno, the nation’s gambling mecca in the 1950s, led the way, developing the successful tourist economy that Las Vegas later embraced. Through the 1970s the two cities resembled each other greatly, but Las Vegas grew to achieve global significance, while Reno slowly declined, searching for new industries to power its future. Moehring shows that the development of the Las Vegas Strip was crucial to southern Nevada’s success. The casinos, hotels, and entertainments of the Strip, and the workers they supported, formed a new urban center ringed by offices, residences, shopping, and a major university. In effect, it became a third metropolis, governed by county commissioners, larger than Reno and Las Vegas combined. Moehring brings the story of the three cities to the present day, examining lessons learned from the Great Recession and the efforts under way in all three metropolises to diversify their economies. Moehring makes an important contribution with the only current study of Nevada’s cities, focusing on urban development issues rather than social history or the gaming industry. As the service economy continues to grow, not only in Nevada but throughout the United States, Moehring’s work has many implications for urban studies and particularly the study of urban development in other metropolitan areas.

Monte Carlo and Las Vegas have become synonymous with casino gambling. Both destinations featured it as part of a broad variety of leisure and consumption opportunities that normalized games of chance and created emotional atmospheres that supported the hedonistic aspects of gambling. Urban spaces and architecture were carefully designed to enable a rapid growth of the casino industry and produce experiences on previous unimaginable scale. Feeling Lucky, is a “making of story,” about cities which acquired a strange and captivating allure of mystery around them. It is more than a mere descriptive account, however. Combining urban history, the history of consumption, and sociological approaches it presents a compelling comparative history of Monte Carlo and the Las Vegas Strip between the 1860s and 1970s. Paul Franke takes the reader on a journey from arriving at the cities, through the carefully planned urban environments and into the famous casinos. The analysis follows the paths contemporary gamblers would have taken, right to the gambling tables and to the shifting gambling practices across a century. Franke shows that casino entrepreneurs succeeded in producing and selling gambling experiences by controlling spaces, adapt leisure practices and appeal to specific markets. Gamblers on the other hand regarded Monte Carlo and Las Vegas as places to engage in games of chance that would allow them to preserve their political, cultural, and moral identities.

In 1950 Las Vegas saw a million tourists. In 1960 it attracted ten million. The city entered the fifties as a regional destination where prosperous postwar Americans could enjoy vices largely forbidden elsewhere, and it emerged in the sixties as a national hotspot, the glitzy resort city that lights up the American West today. Becoming America’s Playground chronicles the vice and the toil that gave Las Vegas its worldwide reputation in those transformative years. Las Vegas’s rise was no happy accident. After World War II, vacationing Americans traveled the country in record numbers, making tourism a top industry in such states as California and Florida. The Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce saw its chance and developed a plan to capitalize on the town’s burgeoning reputation for leisure. Las Vegas pinned its hopes for the future on Americans’ need for escape. Transforming a vice city financed largely by the mob into a family vacation spot was not easy. Hotel and casino publicists closely monitored media representations of the city and took every opportunity to stage images of good, clean fun for the public—posing even the atomic bomb tests conducted just miles away as an attraction. The racism and sexism common in the rest of the nation in the era prevailed in Las Vegas too. The wild success of Frank Sinatra’s Rat Pack performances at the Sands Hotel in 1960 demonstrated the city’s slow progress toward equality. Women couldn’t work as dealers in Las Vegas until the 1970s, yet they found more opportunities for well-paying jobs there than many American women could find elsewhere. Gragg shows how a place like the Las Vegas Strip—with its glitz and vast wealth and its wildly public consumption of vice—rose to prominence in the 1950s, a decade of Cold War anxiety and civil rights conflict. Becoming America’s Playground brings this pivotal decade in Las Vegas into sharp focus for the first time.

The Westside Slugger is the powerful story of civil rights in Las Vegas and Nevada through the eyes and experience of Joe Neal, a history-making state lawmaker in Nevada. Neal rose from humble beginnings in Mound, Louisiana, during the Great Depression to become the first African American to serve in the Nevada State Senate. Filled with an intense desire for education, he joined the United States Air Force and later graduated from Southern University—studying political science and the law at a time of great upheaval in the racial status quo. As part of a group of courageous men, Neal joined a Department of Justice effort to register the first black voters in Madison Parish. When Neal moved to southern Nevada in 1963 he found the Silver State to be every bit as discriminatory as his former Louisiana home. As Neal climbed through the political ranks, he used his position in the state senate to speak on behalf of the powerless for more than thirty years. He took on an array of powerful opponents ranging from the Clark County sheriff to the governor of the state, as well as Nevada’s political kingmakers and casino titans. He didn’t always succeed—he lost two runs for governor—but he never stopped fighting. His successes included improved rights for convicted felons and greater services for public education, mental health, and the state’s libraries. He also played an integral role in improving hotel fire safety in the wake of the deadly MGM Grand fire and preserving the pristine waters of Lake Tahoe, which brought him national attention. Neal lived a life that personified what is right, just, and fair. Pushing through racial and civil rights hurdles and becoming a lifelong advocate for social justice, his dedication and determination are powerful reminders to always fight the good fight and never stop swinging.

When Pittsburgh socialite Laura Corey rolled into Reno, Nevada, in 1905 for a six-month stay, her goal was a divorce from the president of U.S. Steel. Her visit also provided a provocative glimpse into the city's future. With its rugged landscape and rough-edged culture, Reno had little to offer early twentieth-century visitors besides the gambling and prostitution that had remained unregulated since Nevada's silver-mining heyday. But the possibility of easy divorce attracted national media attention, East Coast notables, and Hollywood stars, and soon the "Reno Cure" was all the rage. Almost overnight, Reno was on the map. Alicia Barber traces the transformation of Reno's reputation from backward railroad town to the nationally known "Sin Central"—as Garrison Keillor observed, a place where you could see things that you wouldn't want to see in your own hometown. Chronicling the city's changing fortunes from the days of the Comstock Lode, she describes how city leaders came to embrace an identity as "The Biggest Little City in the World" and transform their town into a lively tourist mecca. Focusing on the evolution of urban reputation, Barber carefully distinguishes between the image that a city's promoters hope to manufacture and the impression that outsiders actually have. Interweaving aspects of urban identity, she shows how sense of place, promoted image, and civic reputation intermingled and influenced each other—and how they in turn shaped the urban environment. Quickie divorces notwithstanding, Reno's primary growth engine was gambling; modern casinos came to dominate the downtown landscape. When mainstream America balked, Reno countered by advertising "tax freedom" and natural splendor to attract new residents. But by the mid-seventies, unchecked growth and competition from Las Vegas had initiated a downslide that persisted until a carefully crafted series of special events and the rise of recreational tourism began to attract new breeds of tourists. Barber's engaging story portrays Reno as more than a second-string Las Vegas, having pioneered most of the attractions-gaming and prizefighting, divorces and weddings-that made the larger city famous. As Reno continues to remold itself to weather the shifting winds of tourism and growth, Barber's book provides a cautionary tale for other cities hoping to ride the latest consumer trends.

US Anti-Gambling Laws and Regulations Handbook

Provides information on lodging and casinos, restaurants, recreational activities, entertainment and night life, and gambling.