South Lake Tahoe: Where the State Line Runs Through the Casino
Near Tahoe City, California
South Lake Tahoe is a city that exists partly because of a state line. California banned casino gambling; Nevada did not. So when the resort boom arrived in the nineteen fifties, the action concentrated precisely on the Nevada side of the border, within walking distance of California beaches.
William Harrah opened his Stateline casino in nineteen fifty-eight, and others followed so quickly that the strip became one of the strangest real estate facts in the West: you could walk from a California ski lodge across a parking lot into a Nevada blackjack table.
South Lake Tahoe itself was not incorporated until nineteen sixty-five, when several separate lakeside communities merged into one city. The lake above it all, sixteen hundred and forty-five feet deep and one of the clearest in the world, predates every casino, every parking lot, and every state boundary by about two million years.
