What happens in Las Vegas...
The desert city’s wild past is celebrated at these quirky locations.
Las Vegas is one of America’s youngest cities. It was founded in 1905 after a Wild West-style land auction that quickly went bust, before rising again like a mirage in the Nevada desert in the 1940s as the world’s most raucous gambling and entertainment capital.
Ever since, it has gained a reputation for wiping out its past without sentiment or regret. Most of its illustrious old casinos from the 1960s Rat Pack era of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr have vanished without trace.
But there are three fascinating sites that preserve and celebrate Las Vegas’s peculiar history.
GANGSTERS’ PARADISE
Vegas’s crime-riddled origin story is surely the most mythologised in America, and the city has recently embraced it with an institution that blends academic erudition with a gleeful carnival air. The Mob Museum bills itself with the cheeky tagline “A Vegas experience you can’t refuse”, although is also known more soberly as the National Museum of Organised Crime and Law Enforcement.
A Vegas must-see since it opened downtown in 2012, the museum is housed in the city’s former courthouse, an imposing neoclassical structure built in the Depression that became notorious in 1950-51 when US senators on the so-called Kefauver Committee arrived from Washington DC for hearings into seedy gangland activities. (It was named after Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver, who led the attempted clean-up and was one of the first committees nationally televised.)
The city’s connections with the mafia had been firmly established in the mid-1940s with the construction of its first casino, the Flamingo Hotel, by Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, a debonair Brooklyn-born hood funded by powerful east coast crime syndicates.
Originally budgeted at $US1.2m, costs had soared to over $US6m by mid-1947, infuriating Siegel’s backers. On the night of June 20, a barrage of bullets tore through the window of Siegel’s Beverly Hills mansion, killing him instantly.
Although the crime was never solved, three associates of Meyer Lansky, a diminutive New York mobster nicknamed “the Jewish godfather”, walked into the Flamingo hours later and announced they were taking charge of operations. Needless to say, nobody argued. In 1950-51, FBI agents and casino owners testified in the museum’s second-floor courtroom, now restored, although no mafia hitmen were put on trial.
Fact and mythology blur at the museum. There are many fascinating real exhibits, including antique slot machines that look like robotic cowboys, Bugsy Siegel’s yellow-frame sunglasses, Tommy guns used by casino enforcers, and one of Nevada’s original electric chairs. These are interspersed with projected clips of famous film noirs set in Vegas, gangster movie posters and video screens showing choice bloody scenes from The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, which fictionalises the Kefauver hearings.
A wall is also devoted to “The Mob’s Greatest Hits” – a graphic photo collection of gory mafia murders, showing the bloodied bodies of victims such as “Crazy Joe” Gallo and Carmine “Cigar” Galante. The most genuinely morbid historical relic is the St Valentine’s Day Massacre wall, riddled with the bullet holes sprayed by Al Capone’s henchmen to kill seven men at the height of Prohibition in Chicago in February 1929. When the garage was torn down in 1967, a businessmen purchased the wall and put it into a travelling exhibit before it found a home in the museum. For good measure, a number of the Capone gang’s gun cartridges found at the crime scene are on display, as is the coroner’s report.
The museum also has a jazz-age speakeasy with its own distillery in the basement offering an array of cocktails – a perfect place to settle a visitor’s nerves.
ELECTRIC ART
“The Neon Boneyard”, properly known as The Neon Museum, is so strange and beautiful that Mick Jagger made a point of visiting when he last performed in Vegas. Looking like a backlot for a science-fiction movie, it’s an enormous sandy space where the city’s famously extravagant electric signs are brought after casinos are knocked down. It’s best seen on an after-dark tour, when giant neon dice, roulette wheels and showgirls from long-forgotten pleasure domes are lit up in glorious colour. Neon styles have changed over time.
The oldest survivors from the 1940s promoted Vegas as a Wild West frontier, using glowing images of green cactuses, a cowboy named “Vegas Vic”, and dubious Native American portraits. (“It wasn’t the most PC era,” the museum guide says of one, the Chief Hotel Court, which used a glowing Native American profile. “When this went up in 1940, the Southern Paiute Indians were on a reservation outside Vegas without electricity, and desperately trying to get it installed.”)
Perhaps the most intriguing attraction is the sparkling, 60m-high sign of the once-cherished Stardust Casino, a Vegas tower from 1958 that evoked the goofy futuristic optimism of the The Jetsons. The casino opened at the height of “atomic tourism”, when crowds flocked here to watch mushroom clouds rising from the above-ground testing at Frenchman’s Flat, 100km away. The hotel would publish schedules of the explosions and hand out protective goggles so guests could party at the rooftop bar, unaware they were absorbing radiation from the new technology.
The stylish Stardust was levelled in 2006, to the lament of its many devotees, and replaced with a sprawling casino called Resorts World. In its lobby, a scale replica of the Stardust sign sits by a downstairs escalator; a nod to Vegas casino history.
THE DIVORCEES’ DIGS
Vegas is at its most surprising in Floyd Lamb Park on the northern fringe of the city, about 30km from the Strip. The natural preserve on the edge of the arid Mojave Desert is shockingly green; a gorgeous oasis of wetlands and willow-lined lakes filled with ducks, geese and water fowl, all framed by spectacular mountains. Its core is the remains of Tule Springs, Vegas’s last remaining “divorce ranch”. In the ’40s and ’50s, rich Americans wanting to untie the wedding knot would travel to Vegas and stay for the required six weeks to obtain Nevada residency and thus divorce, a time frame that was months, if not years, faster than other US states at the time.
The 400ha Tule Springs ranch was founded in 1948 by the excellently named Proper Goumand, who created an attractive refuge for potential divorcees to spend their time fishing, canoeing, reading, swimming and dancing. Notorious guests included Elizabeth Taylor, the sister of Errol Flynn, and Ria Langham, wife of actor Clark Gable.
Although its splendid former swimming pool is now filled with sand, the ranch’s white wooden lodge buildings are today intact across fields patrolled by peacocks. Faded photographs scattered around the site show guests looking deliriously happy.
Ironically, Tule Springs is so idyllic today it has become a popular spot for modern Las Vegas couples to pose for their wedding photographs.
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