Welcome to the oldest hotel and casino in Las Vegas, the Golden Gate. The Golden Gate opened as the Hotel Nevada on January 13, 1906 — eight months after the city itself was founded — and has been operating continuously ever since. In a city where buildings routinely disappear after twenty years, the Golden Gate's 120-year survival is nothing short of miraculous, a testament to either sentiment or stubbornness, or possibly both.
The original Hotel Nevada was a three-story brick building with 30 rooms, a telephone — one of the first in Nevada — and rates of one dollar per night. It served railroad workers, ranchers, prospectors, and the small commercial class that was beginning to grow up around the Southern Pacific railroad stop. Las Vegas in 1906 had no casinos: gambling was illegal. The hotel's modest bar served the legal entertainment needs of a frontier town.
When Nevada legalized gambling in 1931, the Hotel Nevada became the Sal Sagev — Las Vegas spelled backward, a piece of wordplay that seemed clever at the time — before eventually becoming the Golden Gate. The shrimp cocktail it introduced for fifty cents became famous throughout Las Vegas. Today it costs a few dollars more, but it is still served in the same glass, still eaten by tourists who have read about it in guidebooks, a tiny tradition connecting the present to the moment when this city was just a desert railway stop with a telephone and a dream.