Most of them were technically in Paradise, the unincorporated area outside the Las Vegas city limits. (They say astronauts could see it from space.) But the old Las Vegas celebrated deserts and the West: its early casinos were the Apache (1932), the El Cortez (1941), the Pioneer and the Last Frontier (1942), the El Rancho (1941), the Desert Inn (1950), the Sahara (1952), the Stardust and the Dunes (1955).
Las Vegas was so bright you couldn’t see stars anywhere near the city, and you could see the glow on the horizon from dozens of miles away.
Behind the casinos lining Las Vegas Boulevard was the desert itself - pale, flat, stony ground with creosote bushes here and there, a vast expanse of darkness, silence, and spaciousness pressing in on the riotousness from all directions. Back then, in the late 1980s, the Strip was the lasciviously long neon tongue a modest-sized city unfurled into the desert. “Oh my God, I’m in hell,” I cried out when the car that had rolled for hours through the luscious darkness of the Mojave night came to a jolting stop at a traffic light on Las Vegas Boulevard, right by the giant oscillating fuchsia flowers of the Tropicana. Las Vegas Boulevard (Photo: Marit & Toomas Hinnosaar/flickr CC 2.0)
