Online Nevada Encyclopedia

Jeff Burbank

Sheldon Adelson

Sheldon Adelson (1933 - ), the at times controversial billionaire casino developer who made and lost fortunes in the 1960s, rode the tide of the personal computer revolution in the 1980s and 1990s with his computer trade show, and used the revenue to build The Venetian and The Palazzo on the Strip.

Sands Hotel

One of the most iconic of the hotel-casinos built on the Las Vegas Strip, the Sands hotel would literally put Las Vegas in the national spotlight as a center of entertainment and celebrity hangout, especially while it served as the home base for the popular Rat Pack performers in their heyday, from the late 1950s through the 1960s.

San Pedro, Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad

The San Pedro, Los Angeles & Salt Lake Railroad, the first direct route from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles when it was completed in 1905, was perhaps the single most significant factor in the creation of what would become the city of Las Vegas, and later, Clark County.

Sahara

When the troubled Club Bingo resort, on the northern end of the Las Vegas Strip, went bankrupt in 1950 after three years in business, its operator, former Los Angeles jeweler Milton Prell, saw a chance for recovery by building a new hotel-casino, which he would call the Sahara. Prell talked Desert Inn hotel investor A. Pollard Simon into raising the money for it, and convinced Flamingo Hotel builder Del Webb to construct the Sahara in exchange for a twenty percent ownership share.

Riviera Hotel

Originally to be called the Casa Blanca, the Riviera hotel project languished in the early 1950s as its five partners, mostly from Miami, ran into licensing problems after the Nevada Tax Commission learned that one of its applicants had ties to the infamous mobster Meyer Lansky. In 1953, the commission approved a new set of partners, including Harpo and Gummo Marx of the Marx Brothers comedy group.

Red Rooster

The Red Rooster was one of the most famous nightclubs in Las Vegas from the early 1930s to the early 1950s on present-day Las Vegas Boulevard, where as a "speakeasy" it was once raided by federal government agents for selling liquor during Prohibition.

In the 1920s and early 1930s, while the federal Volstead Act outlawing the sale of alcohol was in force, Las Vegas became notorious for tolerating both illegal gambling and the consumption of alcohol in local clubs, mainly on Fremont Street downtown.

Pair-O-Dice Club and Early Las Vegas Strip

In the early 1930s, as the popularity of nightclubs grew in downtown Las Vegas, two casino-nightclubs were built several miles outside of downtown on Highway 91, a site that would later become the Las Vegas Strip. Owners of these early highway casinos, outside the city limits, sought to attract motorists before they arrived downtown.

Meadows Club

The Meadows Club was one of the first casinos to open in Las Vegas in the weeks after the Nevada legislature legalized casino gambling in March 1931, during the prohibition era. In its early years, the Meadows, with its live entertainment and fancy interior, was regarded as the finest casino in Las Vegas, and a forerunner of the modern casinos that followed in the 1940s.

McWilliams Townsite

In 1902, pioneer rancher Helen J. Stewart hired surveyor J. T. McWilliams to map out her 1,800 acres of ranch land in the Las Vegas Valley so that it could be sold to United States Senator William Clark of Montana, who was building a railroad through the area from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles. While surveying the Stewart Ranch, McWilliams noticed that part of a separate eighty-acre tract, owned by the U.S.

Luxor Hotel

The Luxor, an Egyptian pyramid-shaped hotel opened by William Bennett's Circus Circus Enterprises in 1993, was among the first of a decade-long wave of new megaresorts to emerge on the Las Vegas Strip in the 1990s during the brief period when megaresorts flirted with catering toward adults with children.

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