Right here, the Las Vegas Strip began, when El Rancho Vegas opened in 1941. On April 3, 1941, Thomas Hull opened El Rancho Vegas on what was then just a stretch of US Highway 91 outside the city limits of Las Vegas. Hull was a California hotel operator who had built motor hotels along western highways, and he chose this location deliberately: outside city limits meant lower taxes, looser regulations, and freedom from the downtown casino operators who might object to competition.
El Rancho Vegas was unlike anything Las Vegas had seen. Instead of a simple casino attached to a hotel, Hull created an integrated resort — a swimming pool, a steakhouse, a showroom, landscaped grounds, a Western theme with covered wagons decorating the exterior. Guests came not just to gamble but to stay, to eat, to be entertained. The model proved enormously influential. Every resort that followed on the Strip owes its basic DNA to what Hull built here.
The Last Frontier opened a mile up the road the following year, and the strip of highway between them became the embryonic Las Vegas Strip. El Rancho Vegas survived for nearly twenty years before fire destroyed it in June 1960. The site has been variously redeveloped over the decades. What you see here today is a footnote in the landscape where the entire American resort industry was invented.