KVIG Informative

Las Vegas and Henderson are still fighting over who pays to fix a road that was never built for the cities that grew up around it. Boulder Highway wasn’t planned as a city street. It was a federal construction route, built fast and built once, and the paving choices made in 1931 are still showing up in pedestrian fatality counts a century later.

The Bureau of Reclamation needed a way to move men, mules and heavy equipment from the rail yard at Las Vegas to the dam site at Black Canyon, and in March 1931 it put contractor R.G. LeTourneau to work grading the route, according to Bureau of Reclamation construction photographs held in the Ray Cutright Collection at UNLV Libraries Special Collections and Archives. The road’s working name at the time was the Black Canyon Highway.

LeTourneau’s crews graded the roadbed with mule teams before motorized equipment arrived, according to a 1931 photograph from the same UNLV-held Bureau of Reclamation collection captioned “Boulder Highway construction.” Caterpillar tractors took over grading the stretch from Boulder City to the dam site by that May and June, the collection’s photo captions state.

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The highway’s name outlasted the dam’s own naming dispute. Dennis McBride, curator of history and collections at the Nevada State Museum in Boulder City, has written that the road kept the name Boulder Highway through the years federal officials alternated between calling the dam itself Hoover Dam and Boulder Dam. The highway was built in 1931, and its name never changed even as the dam’s did.

More than 200 miles of new road were cut into undeveloped desert to supply the seven work camps strung along the construction route, according to the Bureau of Reclamation’s own construction history of the project. Boulder Highway was the spine of that network, the direct link between the rail terminus in Las Vegas and the workforce town of Boulder City, which the Bureau of Reclamation and Six Companies built starting in 1931 to house the dam’s engineers and laborers, according to reporting in the Boulder City Review drawing on Bureau of Reclamation construction records.

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The federal government maintained the highway through the Bureau of Reclamation for years after the dam was finished, according to the Gribble Nation historical roadway research project’s review of Bureau of Reclamation planning documents and period highway maps. Nevada did not take over the route as a numbered state highway until decades later, and the Nevada Department of Transportation transferred its remaining Henderson segment to the city only recently, according to City of Henderson project announcements.

That history is why the road still carries the shape of a construction supply route through the middle of two growing cities. A Regional Transportation Commission study found that roughly 1 in 10 pedestrian deaths in Nevada happen on Boulder Highway, and Henderson’s own Reimagine Boulder Highway project describes the corridor as a high-speed arterial road, characterized by older strip commercial development, built for cars moving fast between two points rather than for the neighborhoods that eventually grew up along it.

A road graded by mule teams to haul dam equipment through empty desert became, within a few decades, the single corridor two growing cities built around and then never fully retrofitted. The $185 million project now underway in Henderson is an admission that the fix was never going to be simple: you cannot zone your way out of a road’s original purpose.