Automobiles and Gambling

The importance of the automobile became immediately apparent in Las Vegas.

The automobile forged still another link between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, for the two cities were but three hundred miles distant along a convenient highway.

The car lay near the heart of the way of living that Angelenos held out to the rest of the nation. Southern Californians had elevated the automobile to the basis for a new pattern of urban life.

The sprawl, the mobility, and the rootlessness that characterized Los Angeles society were all attributable in large part to cars.

The influence of autos steadily became more visible throughout the land, although nowhere more spectacularly than on the Strip in Las Vegas.

Once utterly dependent on the railroad, the urban resort became just as reliant on automobiles during the mid-twentieth century.

By the 1920s and 1930s, tourists from the Far West had already accepted automobile travel as a prominent form of vacationing.

After curtailed use of autos during World War II, people throughout the United States took avidly to car touring. By 1953, fully 83 percent of all vacationers, in the East as well as the West, traveled by automobiles and supported a blossoming highway tourist industry.

More than 85 percent of the visitors to Nevada traveled by car, and almost half of all cars headed for Las Vegas came from Southern California.

As the auto brought tourists to Las Vegas in record numbers after 1945, it also contributed to the atmosphere for gaming.

Automobiles helped to recreate the feeling of transiency and adventure that urged previous generations of westering people to gamble.

Americans in the postwar period, like Angelenos before them, became increasingly aware of the rootlessness that car travel induced.

While the auto sped tourists away from hometowns, it also loosened the conventional psychological restraints that would otherwise inhibit activities like casino gambling, and kindled an appreciation for movement and speed.

Both activities were rapid and transitory experiences to be consumed for their own sakes and then forgotten with little regard for ultimate consequences or costs.

In this manner, cars reinforced the willing suspension of disbelief upon which depended commercial leisure in Los Angeles and casino in southern Nevada.

Automobiles shaped the resort city physically as well as psychologically. The landscape and architecture of the Strip conformed to the needs of the car.

The resort hotels along the Los Angeles highway made Las Vegas the 'ultimate achievement of the motor-court civilization and underscored its appeal to American travelers who were increasingly dedicated to auto tourism.