In the 1960s, back up when Las Vegas’ Meadows Addition neighborhood was nice, showgirls lived there. They liked to sunbathe au naturel at their apartment pools because they didn’t similar suntan lines.
That’s the commonly told story of how the Naked City, a community of low-rent flat buildings and houses inwards the shade of the Stratosphere just northward of the Las Vegas Strip, got its nickname. And it’s hooey.
Not a bingle newspaper publisher denotation to Naked City appears inwards a Las Vegas newsprint before a June 20, 1982 Las Vegas Review-Journal cover story headlined: “’Naked City’ a Las Vegas Battleground.”
In that story, Lt. St. John Conner reported investigating 10 killings in the neighbourhood in 16 months. “Most of them appear to live drug-related,” the homicide chief said.
Myth Understanding
The Meadows Addition — “Las Vegas” is Spanish for “the meadows” — was created inwards the late 1940s as a gridiron of 16 streets named after other cities, including New York, Chicago, Cleveland, St. Louis, and Philadelphia. Before the Sahara Desert opened inward 1952, Sahara Desert Avenue was whole contained in this community, where it was known as San Francisco Street.
When its first of all apartment buildings opened inward 1953, the Meadows Addition became a pop rest home for Strip employees, including showgirls, who found the low-toned rents and little commutes ideal. But the enlargement of Las Vegas beyond the Strip eventually gave its hospitality workers and performers their pluck of nearby accommodations, including beautiful unexampled houses that were also pretty priced and more suited to nurture families.
By the tardily 1970s, the Meadows Addition had suit forgotten by almost everyone except dose dealers, gangs, and illegal sexuality workers. Locals and cops nicknamed it after The Naked City, a 1948 take noir well-nigh the New House of York City police force track down for a manslayer that later inspired a gritty, 1958-1964 TV series of the same name.
In fact, that 1982 R-J story stated that the neighborhood is “called ‘Naked City’ past Metro police officers.”
The path the phrase explodes onto the local paper, concluded with circumstance that the musical phrase was used past Metro, and the path it was used incessantly is all tough to ignore,” said Jeffrey Carlson, who publishes the Vintage Las Vegas history website, which features a brand on Naked City.
Over the decades, Carlson said, he radius to dozens of residents of the area in the ’60s and ’70s who “never heard the name.”
The Naked Truth
The epithet didn’t sit around substantially with Naked City’s prop owners. They included Bob Stupak, who, in 1979, opened the Vegas World casino holiday resort on land he owned inwards the neighborhood.
In 1996, Stupak replaced it with the Stratosphere whose 1,149-foot observance tower remains the largest structure due west of the Mississippi, remodeling Vegas World’s towers for the new purpose.
Stupak’s friends in metropolis governance agreed to rebrand the neighbourhood as Meadows Village inwards the later(a) ’80s. They also told and retold the plow story of the sunbathing showgirls, insisting that the Naked City moniker had nil to get along with crime.
Several local businesses signed on to fete the rewritten history, including Naked City Pizza, Naked City Audio, and Naked City Sweets.
“The dependent is interesting to me because it’s non a touristry story like so many other Vegas myths, and because the breach between the sunny, titillating fable and the grim realness of the counter-story are so distant from i another,” Carlson said. “To put it inwards personal terms, i want to trust the sun-tanning showgirl story, because the alternative is depressing.”
Look for “Vegas Myths Busted” every Mon on Casino.org. To scan antecedently busted Vegas myths, inspect VegasMythsBusted.com. Got a prompting for a Vegas myth that needs busting? Email corey@casino.org.
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