In 1955, 50 years after Vegas was founded on May 15, 1905, LIFE magazine took a rather skeptical look at the boom town and its prospects for growth in a cover story titled “Gambling Town Pushes Its Luck.” The Loomis Dean images in this gallery, meanwhile — many of which were never published in LIFE — provide some wonderful visual reminders of just how raw a place Vegas still was in the mid-Fifties, before the Rat Pack made it their home away from home and decades before the city would begin reinventing itself yet again, with some success, as a “family friendly” mecca.
Long before Celine, decades before Garth, even way back before the Griswolds took the dam tour and asked a lot of dam questions, this was the image
I remember from travels in the old family truckster....and to a kid of seven or eight, this was practically Sodom and Gomorrah.
Apparently, "pushing its luck" paid off fair to middlin for the town where what happens, stays.
Viva Las.....
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