The 1906 Golden Gate: Las Vegas's Oldest Hotel

On January thirteenth, nineteen oh six, the Hotel Nevada opened at the corner of Fremont and Main in downtown Las Vegas, eight months after the city had been incorporated as a railroad town. It was the first hotel in Las Vegas. It is still operating.

The building was renamed the Golden Gate Hotel and Casino in nineteen seventy-four. Two decades earlier, in nineteen fifty-five, the Moulin Rouge had opened on the Westside, the same year the Strip was becoming something new. The Golden Gate stayed where it had always been, at the old corner, serving a version of Las Vegas that predated the resort corridor by half a century.

One hundred and twenty years of Las Vegas history passed through that corner: the railroad workers who needed somewhere to sleep in a new desert town, the gamblers who arrived after Nevada legalized casino gambling in nineteen thirty-one, the Fremont Street regulars who preferred downtown to the Strip, and now the tourists who walk past it on the Fremont Street Experience canopy looking for something that feels older than the LED light show overhead.

The Golden Gate is listed as a Nevada State Historic Landmark. It is the oldest continuously operating hotel in Las Vegas, which in a city that demolishes its landmarks on a regular basis is not a small distinction.

Whatever Las Vegas was before the casinos got big, before the mob money, before Howard Hughes, before the Mirage changed everything again, this corner was already here. The building is not impressive from the outside. That is the point.