KVIG Informative

Genevieve Harrison opened a boarding house on F Street in 1942 because Las Vegas’s Strip hotels would not rent a room to a Black traveler, performer or defense worker. The National Park Service now calls her house the only known example of its type still standing in the city. What was once one option among several on the segregated Westside is now the sole physical record of how Black Las Vegas got a bed for the night.

Las Vegas’s Westside developed as a majority-Black neighborhood through the 1930s and 1940s, as segregation barred Black residents and visitors from hotels, restaurants and neighborhoods elsewhere in the city, according to the National Park Service’s listing for the property. Black entertainers who performed at the casinos and resorts springing up along the Strip were not permitted to sleep in them, and boarding houses on the Westside became some of the only lodging available to Black travelers passing through Las Vegas in the 1940s and 1950s, the same listing states.

Harrison moved to Nevada from Texas at the start of World War II, taking advantage of a housing opportunity as wartime labor poured into Las Vegas, according to the National Park Service. She opened her guest house at 1001 F St., in the heart of the Westside, built in 1942 according to Clark County’s own account of the property. The house drew wartime defense workers, Black entertainers and divorce-seekers unable to find rooms anywhere else in the city, the National Park Service’s listing states.

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Nat King Cole, Pearl Bailey and Sammy Davis Jr. all stayed at Harrison’s house while performing in Las Vegas, according to the National Park Service’s listing and Clark County’s own account of the property. Davis stayed often enough that the house still keeps a room named for him, according to Clark County. The county’s account describes the house as a safe, welcoming space for Black entertainers who could draw crowds on the Strip but could not rent a room there.

The property was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2016, listed as Harrison’s Guest House under reference number 15000009, according to the National Park Service. The federal listing recognizes the house for its significance to ethnic heritage and to entertainment and recreation history, and calls it the only known example of its type remaining in Las Vegas.

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The City of Las Vegas has twice put public money toward keeping the house standing. Its Centennial Commission awarded the Ward 5 Chamber of Commerce $17,500 in 2014 for what the city’s own grant records list as the Harrison Guest House Renovation, and $25,000 more in 2020 for the Harrison Board House Restoration and Renovation, according to the city’s published Centennial grant history. The house now operates as a cultural center and gathering site for the Historic Westside, according to Clark County’s account of the property.

Boarding houses like Harrison’s were never rare on the Westside while segregation lasted; they were the only option Black travelers had. What’s rare is that one of them is still standing well enough to walk through. The room Las Vegas built for the people it wouldn’t let check into its hotels is now the clearest record left of what that exclusion actually looked like, room by room.