Gambling: California's Influence Goes On
Gambling could be pursued in a setting that recalled the pride and glory of the westward movement. Apparently, it had lent a sort of legitimacy to an activity toward which most Americans were ambivalent.
In this manner, the motif of the last frontier, while clearly subsidiary to the dominant role of gambling, nonetheless remained significant in the appeal of downtown Las Vegas to tourists.
While Glitter Gulch continued to recall the heritage of the frontier, hotels and casinos on the Strip were designed using different motifs.
Underlying the resulting diversity of images, though, was gambling, the activity that more than anything else held together an increasingly amorphous city.
On the Strip, gaming took place in a distinctly resort setting.
The hotel complexes along the Los Angeles highway offered tourists every possible convenience, thereby making the shops and services of downtown Las Vegas unnecessary to those travelers who stayed on the Strip.
If the old railroad townsite lost some of its significance as an urban center, it nonetheless retained a specialized appeal.
There, commercial gambling emerged in its least adulterated form. Unencumbered with wedding chapels or guest cottages, gift shops, or parking lots, gourmet restaurants or show rooms, downtown casinos presented but one major service to customers.
Bettors from all classes continued to flock to Glitter Gulch for the straightforward dose of gambling, the last frontier environment which heightened the intense sensation, and the convenience of a glut of casinos located literally next door to one another.
After 1940, gambling came to dominate all aspects of downtown life, and the last frontier theme enhanced the experience of the downtown casino by setting the proper tone.
Americans--- Las Vegas residents in particular, in this manner, perceived the ties between gambling and the westward migration.
Period architecture, western styles of music and dress and decoration, and events like Helldorado served to condition tourists for gambling, just as frontier conditions earlier had encouraged people to take risks.
The last frontier image first merged with and then replaced the railroad as a unifying force among the casinos of downtown Las Vegas, helping to sustain the vitality of the old railway townsite through the mid-twentieth century.
Gambling and the American frontier merged on Fremont Street as they never had before, but Glitter Gulch was only the beginning of the evolution of the western city of Las Vegas as gambling capital of the United States.
In the years after 1945 when the resort metropolis grew at an unprecedented pace, the underlying dynamism of expansion derived not from the downtown district, but rather from the flourishing Strip on the southern outskirts of town where the influence of Southern Californians was most pronounced.
In central Las Vegas, the changes produced a new form in the American culture of gambling, the downtown casino, which embodied both the last frontier recreated by Nevadans and the new cultural frontier originating in Los Angeles.
Within the framework of railroad town and last frontier, the downtown casino so magnified the importance of gambling that it became the 'main pattern of life' in Glitter Gulch.