Las Vegas is an ahistoric city. What is meant here by ahistoric? Every city in the United States has overwritten their true history with fake narratives of progress and reconciliation. In this sense, most cities in the United States are revisionist, or what I call anti-historical. Las Vegas is unique in that rather than claiming a sugarcoated history, it claims to be outside history altogether. Las Vegas can tolerate all manner of sins, but it cannot tolerate history, for history erases Las Vegas’ grand promise of self-recreation. Most cities are anti-historical, Las Vegas alone is ahistorical.
To be clear, Las Vegas certainly references history, but it is a cartoonist version in which great things were created without the bloodshed of empire or the sweat of forced labor. In a city where the Eifel Tower stands next to the Pyramids of Giza, visitors to Las Vegas embrace the pulsing allure to drop the past and engage in orgasmic fantasy. In Las Vegas, demolitions of historic hotels and casinos are public events, attracting visitors’ awe much as the atomic mushrooms outside the City impressed those many years before.
Vegas offers a similar allure to its residents. The Las Vegas strip is flanked on either side by two of the largest master planned communities in the United States. The communities are subdivided into villages, which are subdivided once again into neighborhoods. In all but the most expensive neighborhoods, the communities are composed almost exclusively of track homes, from which residents can choose between the A, B, C, and D models (residents are also able to choose the “reverse” house plan of any of the aforementioned options). As a result, travelling through Las Vegas’ outskirts often feels like running in place: the mountains in the distance might change, but the houses never stop repeating themselves. In many ways, Las Vegas’ suburbs feel like the strange synthesis of the capitalist and communist dream. The City presents itself as one of the last places in the country where a middle class life is still possible: the housing is unbelievably affordable, businesses are easy to open and cheap to operate, and the lack of a state income tax boosts every resident’s take home pay. In many ways the Wild West ethos and the affordable cost of living create an individualist’s utopia. The catch, however, is that in this Randian paradise, every one of its thriving individuals must live in exactly the same house with exactly the same yard governed by Kafkaesque homeowners associations enforcing bizarre rules meant to ensure that each and every neighborhood in a village feels exactly the same — the only thing missing is the communal dining halls. And like Communism, Las Vegas too insists on focusing on the promise of the future at the expense of accurately remembering its past.
Thus while other cities highlight false history to enlist a sense of pride in tradition and heritage (e.g. Confederate monuments in the South), Las Vegas feels obliged to obscure every ounce of its history to ensure that its tourists can become fully engaged in its otherworldly fantasy land and its residents can proudly feel they have secured the American Dream through their own hard work and perseverance.
In the 1950s, Las Vegas was known as the “Mississippi of the West” because of its exceptional zeal for Jim Crow. In May 1955, the first upscale integrated casino, the Moulin Rouge, opened on the outskirts of Las Vegas’ Black Westside community. While owned and operated nearly exclusively by White people, the casino emerged as a powerful symbol for the possibility of an integrated Las Vegas and helped to energize commercial activity and development of the Westside.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the Moulin Rouge’s bustling operation didn’t last long and closed mysteriously just six months after opening. But despite its closure, the Moulin Rouge continued to serve as a powerful symbol for the Black community in Las Vegas. In 1960, when the NAACP demanded the Strip integrate or be shut down by a protest so large it would close Las Vegas Avenue during one of the busiest weekends of the year, the Moulin Rouge served as the headquarters in which the Casino magnates and the NAACP negotiated. And when the Strip agreed to integrate (its gambling halls, not its workforce — its workforce wouldn’t be integrated until 1971), the agreement was signed in none other than the Moulin Rouge.
In 1985, Sarann Knight-Preddy (the only woman of color to have possessed a Gaming License in Las Vegas) began the process of purchasing the Moulin Rouge and restoring it to its former glory. While she had successfully operated a casino just down the street, the Gaming Board repeatedly refused to grant her a gaming license for longer than six months or a year at a time (a length which scared off any potential investors due to unnecessary risk).
Determined to have Las Vegas acknowledge the importance of the historic casino, in 1992 Knight-Preddy and her family successfully lobbied to have the Moulin Rouge listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Buoyed by the acknowledgment, Knight-Preddy once again purchased the Moulin Rouge and reopened it for business. But, after several years of trying to secure a longer license and a remarkable amount of money lost trying to appeal to the Gaming Board, Knight-Preddy was forced to finally give up her dream of reopening the Moulin Rouge and sold the Casino to an investment group.
But Las Vegas cannot stand the sight of its own history. It would rather open a Bayou-themed Resort and Casino (yes, this is a real thing) then let stand a vestige to the resilience and perseverance of its severely abused Black community. While other cities at least pay lip service to their histories by opening African American museums, monuments, or murals, Las Vegas’ only gesture to recognize the importance of the Westside was to allow the overpass that would physically partition the Westside from Downtown and the Strip to say “Historic Westside” even as the community protested the very existence of the new barrier.
In 2003, the Moulin Rouge burst out in flames. The police arrested two arsonists in connection with the fire. Both lived in the Moulin Rouge and their motives for destroying their own homes without the possibility of receiving insurance money are unclear, but their cases are tightly sealed and are inaccessible for further inquiry.
Despite the setback of the 2003 fire, hope for the casino was still alive. The historic Moulin Rouge sign on the front of the casino was still in tact and an investment firm had pledged $200 Million to revamp the casino by 2009.
But then, in 2009, fire struck once again, destroying the bulk of the historic property. The legendary Moulin Rouge sign had been conveniently removed from the casino’s façade just a week before the fire to be temporarily housed in Las Vegas’ Neon Museum bone yard. The City, overriding protests from the Knight-Preddy family, used the fire as an excuse to demolish the remainder of the Moulin Rouge and extinguish any remaining hopes of rejuvenation.
And while many have advocated the Moulin Rouge sign be returned to the Westside where it can be prominently displayed, it should come as no surprise that in this cruel, ahistoric city, the only reminder of the nation’s first integrated casino rests buried within a gimmicky tourist attraction, blinking sadly next to rundown signs for the Sahara and the Lady Luck, wondering if the tourists snapping Just Married selfies in front of it might recognize even just a glimmer of its former grandeur.
Jeremy Mann is a maximalist writer who is not totally convinced that a small and witty string of words can accurately describe either him or really anything at all, but can’t help but make an overwrought and meta attempt in the hopes that just maybe it might help someone get a better sense of who he is.
