New laws allowed corporations to own casinos, and these corporations were discovering to their delight, just as the mob had, exactly how much money was in gambling. Vegas was in full plummet then, old hotels barely hanging on, not yet imploded and replaced. All the majestic old signage sits in The Boneyard, on the grounds of the Las Vegas Neon Museum, a great outdoor lot, pale, lost giants devoid of the hotels they once clung to. They had been updated, hurriedly and unbeautifully, slapped up with new towers of rooms (now that garden style motels were no longer in vogue), new entrances, new signage. We thought it was magnificent, even though Vegas was in full plummet then, old hotels barely hanging on, not yet imploded and replaced. Five hours of this and then we’d see the great neon glow ahead in the night. We were driving to Vegas the same way the World War II vets and their wives drove there, the same way my grandparents drove there, having dropped my mother off at a Baltimore orphanage, never to see her again, and headed west-windows rolled down, heading for the pools and air-conditioned rooms of the garden motels in the Paradise Valley desert. This was three decades before I ever even dreamed I would write a novel about the beginnings of Las Vegas and a time when Sin City was haunted by mobsters, entertainers, and occasionally, my grandparents.

And we loved it.īack then, my future husband and I started making road trips to the desert, bearing witness to the last remnants of Old Vegas. In the late eighties, it was dirty, run down, and trashy.

Las vegas casinos 1980's