The Immense Growth of Gambling in Vegas
The downtown casinos in Las Vegas enjoyed its prime during the boom years of the early 1940s.
This was when it underwent local growth and contributed to the unity of the city center. Fremont Street came to be the center of nightlife.
Gambling clubs, as well as many other types of downtown businesses and even private residences, had located there through the 1930s, and by the end of the decade, the block had acquired its first bright neon lights.
Railroad passengers to Las Vegas, whose numbers grew as a result of wartime gasoline rationing and the movement of soldiers, disembarked within view of the casinos and walked but a short distance to reach them.
A spate of new downtown clubs and hotels opened during the war within just a few blocks of the train depot on or adjacent to Fremont Street.
Even before the area had been stripped of its unnecessary shops, novelist Erle Stanley Gardner, acknowledged its central role in the budding gambling resort of Las Vegas.
The 'main stem', or 'Great White Way', as the avenue was nicknamed, overflowed with patrons in those prosperous years.
Customers streamed of the trains stopping next door, rushed in from nearby military bases, flocked up boulder Highway from the magnesium plant, and poured in from the auto courts that lined the road to Los Angeles.
Yet the very success of the downtown gaming district also revealed most clearly its limits as a resort center in the mid-twentieth century.
Despite wartime shortages of gasoline, so many tourists drove cars to the downtown center that in the mid-1942 before curfew was imposed on local businesses, one of the most complained situation was one couldn't find a parking place on Fremont Street at five-thirty in the morning.
Wartime Las Vegas witnessed the beginnings of a parking shortage that lasted into the 1950s.
The overcrowding that afflicted the downtown during the 1940s indicated that if Las Vegas continued to grow, another city district altogether would be needed to accommodate postwar resort development.
Parking problems and other symptoms of congestion illuminated the shortcomings at the railroad town in an automobile age at the same time that the primacy of gaming began to undermine the motif of the last frontier.
The enormous number of cars, which indicated the popularity of Las Vegas, had also begun to reshape the city profoundly.
Once those constraints had been removed, a new gambling district called the Strip would blossom along the highway to Los Angeles, less favored to local traditions, and more attuned to California culture, and the community of Las Vegas would be fragmented irreparably.