Nothing humble about Vegas centennial

updated 5:26 p.m. ET May 23, 2005

LAS VEGAS - A city fond of imploding its past and reinventing itself paused this weekend to celebrate its 100th birthday with a look back at a surprisingly rich pioneer history.

"Las Vegas was a speck in the desert in 1905," Nevada state archivist Guy Rocha said of a town in a bowl-shaped valley rimmed by jagged gray mountains and nourished by a natural spring. The name is Spanish for "the meadows."

"Now there's not a place in the modern world that doesn't recognize Las Vegas," Rocha said. "That's not hype. It is what it is."

American Indians and travelers on the Old Spanish Trail watered at the springs, but the town got its start because the railroad from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles needed a place to house workers.

Today, it's a go-go, 24-hour metropolis of casinos, nightclubs and restaurants that lures 37 million tourists a year. Marquee casinos with dancing fountains and canals sprouted where the springs dried up long ago.

Down the Las Vegas Strip are scale models of the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty and an Egyptian pyramid. Up the Strip, the curvy Wynn Las Vegas resort opened last month at a cost of $2.7 billion.

Not surprising for this city of excess, there's nothing humble about Las Vegas' celebration of the May 15, 1905, land auction that drew hardy buyers to dusty home sites in what is now downtown.

A birthday cake larger than a basketball court, fireworks, concerts, simultaneous "I Do's" for 100 couples, and a resurrected "Helldorado Days" parade were scheduled in and around the town that didn't have a paved road until 1924.

It now has 1.7 million residents and car-choked freeways to funnel residents to work from sprawling suburbs.

"We want the whole world to celebrate with us," said Mayor Oscar Goodman, a former mob lawyer now in his second term.

Drawing attention and people was a lesson learned a century ago from townsfolk artful with hyperbole and unblinking pragmatism.

Round-trip ticket offered
Skeptical of the 1900 U.S. Census, which put the area population at 30 people, Michael Green, a Community College of Southern Nevada professor, checked residents' signatures.

"They look uncharacteristically alike," said Green, co-author of "Las Vegas: A Centennial History." Many probably worked a ranch owned by Helen Stewart, who sold almost 3 square miles to William Andrews Clark for home sites. Clark, namesake for what is now Clark County, was principal owner of the San Pedro, Los Angeles & Salt Lake Railroad.

AP file A photo released by the city of Las Vegas shows the Strip in 1975.

More settlers soon came — drawn from Los Angeles and Salt Lake City by cheap land and the promise of train ticket refund if they plunked down as little as $100 on a lot.

"A $25 down payment and a $22 round-trip ticket to L.A.," recalled Ed Von Tobel Jr., 92, whose father bought two parcels and opened a lumber yard to supply the town's first building boom.

Air conditioning was invented in 1906, but it would be years before it reached the Hotel Nevada, now named the Golden Gate.

"The first question is always, 'What did you do about the hot weather?'" said Von Tobel.

"We didn't notice the heat in those days," said his wife, Evelyne Von Tobel, 90.

Years later, motorists would be lured off the Los Angeles-to-Salt Lake City route by billboards touting cheap shrimp cocktail (still 99 cents at the Golden Gate) and free rooms for gamblers.

Las Vegas got its first highway, golf course and daily passenger air service in the 1920s, but was hurt by a railroad strike.

It recovered in 1931 when state lawmakers relaxed divorce laws and legalized casino gambling, and the federal government began building what would become Hoover Dam on the Colorado River, 30 miles east of town.

Rocha called dam construction "a threshold event."

"It was one of the largest public works project in the history of the nation, and with water and hydroelectric power available, people could start thinking about bigger things."

World War II brought soldiers to a gunnery range that became Nellis Air Force Base, workers to Basic Magnesium Inc. to produce lightweight metal in Henderson for the war effort, and gamblers to downtown Fremont Street.

"The Apache, the Boulder, the Frontier Club, the Pioneer. A lot had Western names and a very Western orientation," Green said of the neon-lit casinos in downtown's "Glitter Gulch."

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