American Experience: Las Vegas - An Unconventional History (25 of 75)

American Experience: Las Vegas - An Unconventional History

Downtown on Fremont Street-- lately dubbed "Glitter Gulch"-- the rugged, western feel of the old frontier outpost still prevailed and joints like the Horseshoe set the tone.
Owned and operated by Benny Binion, a convicted bootlegger who had killed at least two men back home in Texas, the Horseshoe was the only place in town that would accept any bet a player put on the table, no matter how high, and the first to ply the clientele with free booze.
"If you wanna get rich," Binion liked to say, "make little people feel like big people."
Here was a guy who was a bigger-than-life, a tough-talking, pistol-packing Texan.

But he instilled the ethic in this city that the customer was number one.
It 's a clich?
but it's the clich? that has built the most visited place in America.
NARRATOR: But it was the stretch of Highway 91 on the southern edge of town that now most often leapt to mind when Americans thought of Las Vegas.
Known as "the Strip," it was fast becoming what one journalist called "a Never-Neverland of exotic architecture, "flamboyant signery and frenetic diversion that is the heart of this unspiritual Mecca."
Bankrolled almost entirely by the mob, new Strip resorts rose up out of the scrub with dizzying regularity: First the Sahara and the Sands, then the New Frontier and the Riviera and the Dunes, then the Tropicana and the Stardust.
At times, the gala openings were just weeks apart.
And by the end of the decade, the swath of highway would be so lit up with neon that it was visible from 50 miles away.