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Las Vegas: Not Just a Hometown, It's a Bang!

Las Vegans hoped to overcome the unpleasant publicity earned by the problems of several new hotels.

The Southern Nevada Industrial Foundation, launched in early 1956 by civic leaders and local businesspeople, worked to encourage outside investors to take a chance on Las Vegas.

The promotion had little success in recruiting new industrial employers, perhaps because it could not overcome the reputation of the resort city or the resistance of local gamblers.

Nevertheless, the foundation helped to restore confidence in the town, not only within the national business community, but, more importantly, among Las Vegans themselves, who appreciated the steps taken toward development of a more traditional and respectable type of hometown.

Whereas the prospect of new factories promised to normalize Las Vegas by diversifying the economy, conventions held out hope of making tourism itself more respectable by giving visitors a more serious purpose for coming to the resort.

Residents would feel better about their town if tourists had more legitimate reasons for traveling there. Once again, the fiscal crisis of 1955 stimulated the development of this alternative industry.

Las Vegas had hosted conventions since its days as western sideshow to Boulder Dam in the 1930s, but most meetings had been small, regional conferences.

In August 1947, the town hosted its first 'national convention', the Disabled American Veterans, but such affairs remained a tiny offshoot of the main business if gambling.

The six thousand people who attended conventions in 1951 made up but a tiny fraction of the millions who visited southern Nevada that year.

Over the course of the 1950s, the seasonal nature of tourism and the disrepute of casino gambling increasingly encouraged Las Vegans to view large conventions as an essential addition to the local economy.

One far-sighted county commissioner even threatened in 1954 to restrict the reckless construction of more and more hotels if the town did not start to build meeting facilities that could draw enough new business to fill the additional hotel rooms.

The serious slump of the next year finally prompted the town to approve funding for a conventions complex.

By 1959, the hall, as futuristic in design as 'Atomic City' itself, opened to host the World Congress of Flight, a meeting of 6,500 delegates that was ideal for Cold War Las Vegas.

Hundreds of national conferences quickly booked the convention center, and individual resort hotels began adding their own meeting facilities. Las Vegas had gained a respectable 'new career'.

The number of meeting delegates and the money they spent yet amounted to a quite small percentage of the receipts from tourism in 1960, and many conventioneers no doubt appreciated Las Vegas casinos more than the town's new meeting facilities, but the significance of the new hall was disproportionately larger for residents.

They had once again heightened their sense of purpose. By normalizing their adopted metropolis, newcomers found it easier to call Las Vegas home.