Owners of the Pair O’ Dice purposely built the nightclub/casino south of downtown, so as to try to capture some of the Los Angeles tourist traffic headed on Hwy 91 into downtown. (More on this can be found here: What Street is the Las Vegas Strip On? The Pair O’ Dice’s location was on land that would later become the Frontier Hotel and Casino (shown in the photo at the top of the page)- directly across the street from where the Wynn and Encore stand now.īack then however, that parcel of land was in the middle of nowhere. Like the Red Rooster, the Pair O’ Dice was built on Highway 91, also known as the Los Angeles Highway, which would later be called the Las Vegas Strip. It was the oddly named Pair O’ Dice, which had been a successful club previously, but which was granted a gaming license in May of 1931, just a month after the Red rooster. The other “first casino on the Strip” contender was established on a desolate parcel a little south of where today’s Stratosphere now stands. If so, you could say that the Las Vegas strip’s very first casino lasted for less than 100 days. So because of its short longevity, I don’t know if the Red Rooster counts. Oddly enough, in addition to becoming the first casino on the Las Vegas Strip, the Red Rooster became the first casino in Las Vegas to lose its gaming license.Īccording to the book, “License to Steal” (a great book by the way), by author Jeff Burbank, the new gaming board revoked the Red Rooster’s license on July 7, 1931, after federal authorities raided the casino for selling alcohol as prohibition was still the law of the land. Reportedly, they opened with just a few slot machines and one blackjack table.

They were granted this license on April 1, 1931. So when the state of Nevada passed legislation legalizing gambling in March of 1931, owners of the Red Rooster quickly took advantage of the new law, becoming the very first recipient of a gaming licenses in Clark County, Nevada.

Nevada officials had banned gaming in 1911. It’s strange to think that both alcohol and gambling were once both outlawed in Las Vegas, but it’s true. Years before gambling arrived in Sin City, the Red Rooster was actually a popular nightclub that continued to serve alcohol during the prohibition era. The first casino on the Las Vegas strip was the Red Rooster, at the site where the Mirage now stands.

First casino on the las vegas strip