KVIG Informative

Las Vegas Boulevard did not start as a skyline. It started as a 57-acre dude ranch outside the city limits, built by a Los Angeles hotelman betting that motorists driving in on Highway 91 would stop before they reached downtown’s card rooms. A fire took the resort down in under an hour in 1960, and nothing on that scale stood on the property again for decades.

Thomas Hull, a Los Angeles hotel operator, opened El Rancho Vegas on the evening of April 3, 1941, on land along the Los Angeles Highway just outside the Las Vegas city limits, according to the Clark County Fire Department’s own account of the property’s history. The resort was Las Vegas’s first, predating every other hotel-casino later associated with the Strip, the department’s history states.

The property sat on 57 acres at what was then San Francisco Street and the Los Angeles Highway, an intersection now known as Sahara Avenue and Las Vegas Boulevard, according to the Nevada Resort Association’s own history of Nevada gaming. The casino, steakhouse, retail shops and showroom shared one main building, with guest bungalows arranged around it rather than stacked into a tower — a layout the fire department’s account makes clear, since employees that night fought flames around the surrounding bungalows while the main building burned.

Beldon Katleman took over the resort in 1947, beginning what the fire department’s history calls its most prominent period. Entertainers who performed there over the following decade included Pearl Bailey, Phil Ford, Mimi Hines and Red Skelton, according to the same account. Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward married at the resort on Jan. 29, 1958, the department’s history states.

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The fire that ended the original resort broke out backstage at the Opera House Theatre and was first noticed by Clark County Sheriff’s detectives Robert Metler and Conrad Simmons, according to the fire department’s account. Crews arrived around 4:50 a.m. on June 17, 1960. Three engine companies, a ladder truck, two pumpers and a new $50,000 aircraft crash truck responded, and firefighters poured more than 30,000 gallons of water on the blaze.

Detective Simmons directed casino patrons out of the building, and the evacuation went off without injury, the department’s account states. Sheriff W.E. “Butch” Leypoldt and Under-sheriff Lloyd Bell pried open the resort’s walk-in vault while the fire still burned and handed scorched boxes of cash out to employees. About $417,000 in coins melted in the heat, fusing silver dollars together, and performer Betty Grable lost more than $10,000 in costumes stored on the property, according to the same account.

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The main building — casino, steakhouse, shops and showroom together — was a total loss within the hour, and the resort’s 50-foot neon windmill, one of the Strip’s early landmarks, collapsed in the fire, the fire department’s history states. No guests or employees were killed or injured. Katleman initially planned to rebuild on the same scale, but the property that reopened on the site operated as a far smaller motel, according to the department’s account.

The resort that reopened on the site kept running, just never again at the scale Hull had bet Highway 91 traffic on in 1941. The boulevard that grew up around that corner has spent every decade since proving a version of the same bet: that whatever stands on a piece of Strip land now is temporary, and something bigger is already being drawn up to replace it.