Las Vegas was not the first city to acquire an ever-lengthening "strip" of new businesses as it expanded along a single straight line. In fact Las Vegas Boulevard got its nickname because it reminded former LA police captain Guy McAfee of Sunset Strip back home. McAfee moved to Las Vegas in 1938, after being obliged to resign as commander of LA's vice squad merely because he controlled a string of illegal gambling joints. He took over the Pair-O-Dice Club , which had recently opened as Las Vegas Boulevard's first casino. During the next ten years, it was joined by El Rancho , the first real resort, in 1941; the Last Frontier in 1942, which in due course incorporated the Pair-O-Dice ; Bugsy Siegel's legendary Flamingo in 1946; and the Thunderbird in 1948.
For casino owners, much of the appeal of the nascent Strip was that it lay outside the city limits of Las Vegas proper. Instead it was in Clark County, where they completely dominated what little political life there was, and were thus spared the legal and financial scrutiny suffered by their rivals downtown. Their control of the county machine enabled them to resist repeated attempts to bring the Strip under the jurisdiction of the city authorities, and they've been free to pursue untrammeled development ever since.
While the essential spur for every innovation on the Strip remains the desire of each casino to attract gamblers, seduction strategies have changed over the years. When most Las Vegas visitors drove up from California, the Strip was entirely geared toward motorists. Until the 1980s, roadside signs advertising lodging, dining and entertainment bargains were taller and more prominent than the casinos themselves. These days, the tourists fly in, with their accommodation prebooked, and the Strip itself is too clogged with traffic for aimless cruising to be a pleasure. The twin aims of the latest generation of giant casinos have become to keep their own guests on the premises for as much time as possible, and to lure in the pedestrian sightseers who throng the sidewalks outside. Pure spectacle is the name of the game, be it the volcano at the Mirage or the Sphinx at Luxor . Time was when each casino was a standalone oasis; now they're crammed so tightly together that they feed off each other - the Eiffel Tower at Paris , for example, sells itself as the ideal place to watch the fountain ballet at Bellagio across the street.
The northern end of the Strip is traditionally regarded as being the intersection of Las Vegas Boulevard with Sahara Avenue, although since 1996 the Stratosphere , a few blocks north, has made a brave attempt to change public perceptions. Its southern end, by contrast, is constantly shifting. The empty spaces south of the most recent casino to appear here - the latest, but almost certainly not the last, was Mandalay Bay - have always presented the double advantage of offering plenty of room to build, and also the closest location to both California and the airport. Broadly speaking, therefore, in following the Strip from south to north, this section also journeys back through the history of the city.
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