Main Street Station is a Victorian-era themed casino that is also, somewhat unexpectedly, a museum. The building is decorated throughout with genuine antiques and artifacts from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Buffalo Bill Cody's personal railroad car, brass fixtures from the original Coca-Cola headquarters in Atlanta, a section of the Berlin Wall, ornate chandeliers from the old Figaro Opera House in Paris, a bronze water fountain from a Brussels train station.
The Victorian theme was a deliberate counterpoint to the Las Vegas norm. While every other casino surrounded itself with fantasy and flash, Main Street Station leaned into solidity and history, betting that some gamblers preferred the feeling of permanence over the feeling of spectacle. The bet was only partially correct — the property has had financial difficulties over the years — but the building itself is genuinely beautiful in a way that few Las Vegas interiors manage to be.
The site sits at the northern end of the original downtown, near where the Southern Pacific railroad depot stood when Las Vegas was founded. This was the commercial and social center of early Las Vegas: hotels, saloons, dry goods stores, and the auction lots that became the city in May 1905. Main Street was Las Vegas before the Strip existed, before the mob arrived, before the neon signs went up — just a desert town trying to become something.