In 1955 LIFE photographer Loomis Dean trained his lens on the adult playground of Las Vegas. For more images of Sin City in its early years, check out: LasVegas 1950s
Written By: Ben Cosgrove
And the fact that Las Vegas resembles a gaudy neon mirage in the desert? Well, surely no more apt an image could apply to a place where dreams of riches, and occasionally of romance go to die. In 1955, 50 years after Las Vegas was founded, LIFE magazine took a rather skeptical look at the boomtown and its prospects for growth in a cover story titled “Gambling Town Pushes Its Luck.” The Loomis Dean pictures in this gallery, meanwhile provide some wonderful visual reminders of how raw a place Las Vegas was in the mid-’50s, before the Rat Pack made the city its home away from home and decades before it would begin to reinvent itself as a family-friendly mecca.
In Las Vegas last week the temperature was up to a torrid 110 degrees and the townsfolk who operate the only large gambling center in the country welcomed the seasonable weather. With it they expected the usual bountiful summer crop of tourists trying out their luck and leaving their money behind. The sign of good times seemed everywhere. . . . But with all this a shadow of doubt fell across Las Vegas, a worry that the bloom it was set for has started to wilt.
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