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Rolling Back Decades with the Postcards of Rural Nevada

September 19, 2011 at 10:49 AM | by | Comments (0)


So you expect things to be a little bit backward when you leave the bright lights of Vegas for the expanse of nothingness that is the Nevada desert—but 30 years backward? 40, even? That comes as a surprise.

But that's just about how old these postcards of the Las Vegas Strip are that we found on sale in Beatty, NV. Two hours northwest of Vegas on the 95, Beatty's best known for its proximity to Death Valley, its neighboring ghost town, Rhyolite, and its brothels.

What we didn't realise till we got there is just how tiny it is. Scarily tiny. Bad-things-might-happen-to-you tiny. Luckily, a Reno native had advised us to stop at the candy store, so we did. The candy store, by the way, is called Eddie's World and has a massive photo of Eddie the owner on the gas pumps outside. FYI.

And inside, alongside rows and rows of candy, we found postcards. And amongst the postcards of Death Valley and "wild burrows" (sic) we found this one of Vegas—the only one of the Las Vegas Strip.

Ahh, the iconic Las Vegas Strip. Stuffed with all those iconic hotels like MGM Grand, Wynn, Caesars Palace... or, um, according to this postcard, the New Frontier, Stardust, Desert Inn and the Colonial House. That would be, the New Frontier which closed in 1997, the Stardust (closed 1996), Desert Inn (closed 2000) and the Colonial House which we'd never heard of but, according to Flickr, was demolished in the 1980s. So we're thinking this must be a photo from the 70s.

Still, it's nice to see the north end of the Strip so populated. Right now, you've got the Trump in place of the New Frontier, Wynn sprawling over the old Desert Inn/Colonial House site and a big patch of undeveloped land opposite the Peppermill restaurant in the Stardust's old place. The Riviera, which you can see in the picture, is a pit that gave us bedbugs the one night we stayed there, and the Sahara7#151;which you can just make out at the top end of the Strip—shut its doors earlier this year. Oh, and there's the Stratosphere tower which has been dominating the Strip and covering your view of those mountains out the back since 1996.

But maybe the changes of the last 30-odd years haven't quite filtered up to Beatty, yet.

[Photo: Juliab for Jaunted]

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