Guests on the upper floors of hotels like Binion’s Horseshoe watched the mushroom clouds.ĭownstairs, cowboy-hatted Benny Binion, a mobster and convicted murderer from Dallas, lured gamblers to “Glitter Gulch” with a brand-new casino featuring velvet wallpaper and carpeted floors-a step up from the traditional stucco and sawdust. With a population of 24,000, one twenty-fourth its current total, the city was smaller than Allentown, Pennsylvania, or South Bend, Indiana, and so remote that the Army tested atom bombs an hour’s drive away. Las Vegas wasn’t much more than a Sin Village in the early 1950s. “To understand why, you need to know how much this town has changed in 60 years.”

“It’s mostly forgotten, even by people who live here, but the Rouge mattered,” he says. Stan Armstrong, a 56-year-old documentary filmmaker who grew up near the site of the old Moulin Rouge, sees the place as a briefly gleaming facet of the city’s past. Then the workers carted the machines away, padlocked the trailer and left the site of the famous Moulin Rouge to its singing, dancing, wining, dining, hip-shaking, history-making ghosts. And so, last June, workers carried 16 bulky video-poker machines into what locals called a “pop-up casino,” where eight hours of gambling generated a total take of less than $100. This desolate city block had practically no value except as the site of a hotel-casino that closed more than 50 years ago. That was the point: Due to one of myriad quirks of Nevada law, some form of gambling must occur here every two years or the owners lose their gaming license. A banner strapped to the trailer announced that this was the “Site of the Famous Moulin Rouge Casino!” Outside, weeds sprouted through the sun-scorched pavement of a forlorn stretch of Bonanza Road near Three Star Auto Body and Didn’tDoIt Bail Bonds.

Inside, gamblers in shorts, T-shirts and baseball caps fed quarters into video-poker machines. The newest casino in Vegas was a 40-foot trailer in a vacant lot.

First casino on the las vegas strip