Painted Postcards

Fifty places in Las Vegas that are no longer there.

In 1941 a man built a hotel on empty desert outside the Las Vegas city limits, because the taxes were lower out there and the city council had no say. Everything that followed copied him. Almost all of it has been demolished.

Painted Postcards: Las Vegas is a painted record of what stood on that ground. Fifty original illustrations of the hotels, casinos, motels and gambling halls that made the city, from El Rancho Vegas in 1941 to the closing of the Mirage, each one with the history of what actually happened there.

The Sands, imploded in 1996. The Dunes, brought down live on television in front of two hundred thousand people. The Moulin Rouge, the first integrated casino in Nevada, open for barely six months. The Desert Inn, where Howard Hughes checked in for a weekend, declined to leave, and bought the hotel instead. A roadside motel called the Mirage that had to give up its name when a far bigger Mirage arrived down the road. And a gambling shack on Highway 91 that lasted about six months in 1948 and left almost no record behind at all.

Where something stands on that ground today, it appears too, so you can see what replaced it.

Inside:

• Fifty full-page original paintings, in color
• Six essays carrying the story from 1941 to 2025
• Property histories researched from the record, not from the legend
• Disagreements between sources left standing rather than smoothed over