The Elardi family fought a six-year strike by Culinary Workers Union Local 226 at its Las Vegas Strip casino in the 1990s. Nearly two decades after that casino was demolished, the family still owns a 16-acre slice of the site and collects $4 million a year from Wynn Resorts just to lease the empty land.… Continue reading R.E. Griffith and William J. Moore Opened the Hotel Last Frontier in October 1942 as the Strip’s Second Resort. The Family That Owned It During a 1990s Strike Still Owns Part of the Land.

The Bureau of Reclamation published the Final Environmental Impact Statement for the Colorado River’s two biggest reservoirs on July 31, 2026, selecting a preferred plan meant to guide river operations for a decade, through 2036. The dam built to enforce the water-allocation deal behind all of it carries the name of the man credited with… Continue reading Interior Secretary Ray Lyman Wilbur Ordered the Dam in Black Canyon Called Hoover Dam on Sept. 30, 1930. Congress Didn’t Restore That Name Until April 30, 1947.

A Chicago merger in the summer of 2004 joined garment workers with hotel and restaurant workers under one international union. Two decades later, the single largest local in that merged union isn’t in New York or Chicago. It’s the Culinary Workers Union Local 226, on Spring Mountain Road in Las Vegas. UNITE, described in the merged… Continue reading UNITE Merged With the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees on July 8, 2004, to Form UNITE HERE. Its Biggest Local Is Based in Las Vegas.

A single federal decision in 1990 forced Las Vegas to start paying, acre by acre, for every subdivision it built in desert tortoise habitat. Clark County’s permit to keep doing that expires in 2031, and the county’s own numbers show it is running out of room before it runs out of time. The U.S. Fish… Continue reading The Desert Tortoise’s Mojave Population Was Listed as Threatened on March 28, 1990. Clark County’s Permit to Build Around It Runs Out in 2031.

Before the Hoover Dam’s first construction contract was even let, five Las Vegas residents organized to make sure Black workers weren’t locked out of the jobs it would create. The organization they chartered nearly a century ago is still active in Las Vegas today. Arthur McCants, Mary Nettles, Clarence Ray, Zimmie Turner and William “Bill”… Continue reading Five Las Vegans Chartered an NAACP Branch in 1928 to Get Ahead of Hoover Dam Hiring Discrimination. Branch #1111 Is Still Active Today.

The valley’s oldest surviving hotel building has carried three names and passed through at least three ownership groups since 1906, and it is still independently owned today, even as a handful of publicly traded companies have come to control most of the Strip around it. According to a Jan. 13, 1906, item in the Las… Continue reading Las Vegas’s Oldest Hotel Opened in 1906 as the Hotel Nevada. It Didn’t Become the Golden Gate Until a Bay Area Group Leased the Casino Floor in 1955.

The Reno-Sparks Indian Colony’s land base grew acre by acre, decades apart, while the city around it grew in leaps — a pattern of catch-up federal action that continues today, as Washington keeps funding construction on trust land Congress didn’t recognize until 1986. In the 1880s, landless Washoe, Northern Paiute and Shoshone people who had… Continue reading The Federal Government Bought 20 Acres for Reno’s Landless Tribes in 1917. Congress Didn’t Put the Rest of Their Land in Trust Until 1986.

The compact that still decides how much Colorado River water reaches Las Vegas was built on bad math from the start — negotiators in 1922 measured the river during two of its wettest decades in five centuries, and the gap between that promise and the river’s real flow is the same gap Nevada is now… Continue reading The Colorado River Compact Promised 16.5 Million Acre-Feet a Year in 1922. The River Has Never Carried That Much.

The Desert Inn opened on the Strip in 1950 with Wilbur Clark’s name on the marquee and Moe Dalitz’s money behind the tables, the same hidden-ownership pattern that Nevada’s modern gaming licensing rules were eventually built to catch. Wilbur Clark had already run two Las Vegas gambling operations before he broke ground on the Desert… Continue reading Wilbur Clark Ran Short of Cash Building the Desert Inn in 1949. A Cleveland Gambling Syndicate’s $1.3 Million Bought 74% of the Casino Before It Ever Opened.

Nellis Air Force Base, where Air Force pilots from around the world now train for Red Flag, began as a $10 real estate deal the City of Las Vegas closed in the dead of winter 1941. The Army Air Corps surveyed a small civilian airfield northwest of Las Vegas in late 1940 for conversion into… Continue reading Las Vegas Bought Its Airfield for $10 in January 1941 and Leased Most of It to the Army. The Gunnery School That Followed Became Nellis Air Force Base in 1950.