Golden Nugget Las Vegas History: From Guy McAfee's 1946 Saloon to Steve Wynn's Resort

Who Built the $1 Million Golden Nugget on Fremont Street in August 1946?

Guy McAfee arrived in Las Vegas in 1938 after reform mayor Fletcher Bowron dismantled the Los Angeles Police Department vice protection rackets and forced Southern California's syndicate club operators out of Los Angeles County. McAfee had previously commanded the LAPD vice squad while covertly holding stakes in illegal Clover Club and offshore gambling ship enterprises. Upon relocating to Southern Nevada, he bought the Pair-O-Dice Club on Highway 91, renaming it the 91 Club after the route number, the origin of his nickname for the future "Las Vegas Strip", and opened the Frontier Club on Fremont Street in 1939.

By 1945, McAfee recognized that wartime defense workers and postwar Southern California motorists wanted larger, air-conditioned gambling halls than the narrow 25-foot storefronts lining Fremont Street's first two blocks. Assembling parcels at the southeast corner of Fremont and Second Streets alongside the older Martin-Ferron building at 123 Fremont, McAfee formed the Golden Nugget syndicate with Reno financier Art Ham Sr., theatre operator Roscoe Thomas, and Flamingo visionary Billy Wilkerson, who held a minority interest while simultaneously struggling to finish his luxury resort seven miles south on Highway 91.

Construction cost $1 million, an unprecedented sum for a roomless Downtown gambling hall in 1946. When the doors swung open on August 30, 1946, four months ahead of Bugsy Siegel's ill-fated December debut at the Flamingo, the Golden Nugget immediately became the largest and highest-grossing casino floor in Nevada.

Why Did Guy McAfee Reject Cowboy Decor for 1890s San Francisco Gold Rush Luxury?

Every major competitor in Downtown Glitter Gulch and along early Highway 91, from the Boulder Club and Pioneer Club to El Rancho Vegas, leaned heavily on wagon wheels, rough-sawn pine, steers' skulls, and frontier ranch house motifs. McAfee deliberately inverted that visual formula. Drawing on romanticized memories of 1890s San Francisco and Klondike Gold Rush parlors, he commissioned theatrical interior spaces modeled on a Barbary Coast gentleman's club rather than a dusty bunkhouse.

Archival interior photographs shot between 1946 and 1949 by Pomona postcard photographer Burton Frasher Sr. document the exact finishes inside the original Golden Nugget hall. Massive solid-mahogany backbars salvaged from turn-of-the-century Northern California saloons anchored the perimeter walls beneath gilded Rococo mirrors and imported Austrian cut-crystal chandeliers. Deep red-flock Victorian wallpaper, brass footrails, carpeted aisles, marble accents, and cocktail waitresses dressed in low-cut 1890s satin gowns signaled high-limit solvency to postwar gamblers.

Outside on Fremont and Second Streets, Young Electric Sign Company (YESCO) chief designer Hermon Boernge engineered an equally theatrical skin. Installed in stages between 1947 and a massive 1956 expansion, Boernge's 100-foot wrap-around marquee layered ruby-red and gold neon tubing over thousands of chasing incandescent bulbs crowned by a multi-story rooftop sign. Paired across the intersection with Benny Binion's Horseshoe (1951) and the Pioneer Club's Vegas Vic down the block, the Golden Nugget facade pumped out enough foot-candles that newsreel cameramen routinely shot color film at midnight without auxiliary arc lights.

How Did 31-Year-Old Steve Wynn Stage His 1973 Boardroom Takeover of the Golden Nugget?

By the early 1970s, the publicly traded Golden Nugget, Inc. suffered from aging facilities, stagnant Fremont Street foot traffic, and unchecked internal skimming by floor personnel. Meanwhile, 29-year-old University of Pennsylvania graduate Stephen A. Wynn, who had moved to Las Vegas in 1967 with a small stake in the Frontier Hotel before running Best Brands wholesale liquor distribution, spotted a real estate bottleneck directly south of Caesars Palace.

In 1971, aided by influential Valley Bank of Nevada chairman E. Parry Thomas, Wynn negotiated with Howard Hughes's Summa Corporation to buy a narrow 1.1-acre strip of Strip-front parking lot next to Caesars Palace for $1.1 million with zero money down. When Wynn threatened to erect a tiny competing slot casino right under Caesars' Roman colonnades, Caesars World bought him out in 1972 for $2.25 million, handing Wynn a roughly $1.1 million pre-tax windfall.

Instead of spending the profit on a small Strip joint, Wynn quietly began buying undervalued shares of Golden Nugget, Inc. on the open market. Armed with a detailed operational dossier documenting widespread cashier and pit theft inside the Downtown property, the 31-year-old investor confronted longtime Golden Nugget president Buck Blaine and the aging board of directors. In August 1973, Wynn won appointment as chairman and president, making him the youngest casino chief executive in Nevada. Within twelve months, he replaced compromised pit bosses, overhauled cage accounting, remodeled the Victorian exterior in crisp white marble and brass trim, and more than quadrupled pre-tax operating income.

How Did the 1977 Hotel Tower, Frank Sinatra & the 'Hand of Faith' Nugget Reinvent the Property?

For its first thirty-one years, the Golden Nugget possessed zero guest rooms, forcing high-rolling craps and baccarat players to sleep at Strip resorts where competing hosts quickly poached their action. Backed by Parry Thomas's Valley Bank credit lines, Wynn broke ground on the Golden Nugget's first high-rise hotel, a 579-room tower that opened in May 1977. Furnished with custom brass beds, marble baths, and two-story penthouse villas, the addition earned Downtown Las Vegas its first Mobil Four-Star resort rating and proved that affluent gamblers would stay on Fremont Street if rooms rivaled Strip standards.

Wynn reinforced the upscale pivot with two masterstrokes of showmanship in the early 1980s. First, after metal-detector hobbyist Kevin Hillier unearthed a massive intact gold specimen just twelve inches underground near Kingower (Wedderburn), Victoria, Australia on September 26, 1980, Golden Nugget purchased the "Hand of Faith" in 1981 for just over $1 million. Weighing 875 troy ounces (61 pounds, 11 ounces / 27.21 kilograms), it went on permanent armored display outside the hotel lobby as the largest intact natural gold nugget exhibited anywhere in the world.

Second, in 1982 Wynn signed Frank Sinatra to a multi-million-dollar contract to headline the intimate 500-seat Cabaret showroom and star alongside Wynn in national television commercials, giving a former Downtown grind address the ultimate Rat Pack seal of prestige while Wynn expanded into Atlantic City (1980) and added the Spa Tower (1984) and North Tower (1986).

How Did Golden Nugget Cash Flows Launch The Mirage and Lead to Landry's Ownership?

When Wynn sold his cramped Atlantic City Golden Nugget to Bally Manufacturing in 1987 for $440 million, he combined those proceeds with Downtown Golden Nugget cash flows and Michael Milken's Drexel Burnham Lambert high-yield bonds to build The Mirage on the Strip. Throughout 1987 and 1988, Golden Nugget, Inc. displayed the architectural scale model of The Mirage right inside the Downtown Fremont Street casino before renaming the parent company Mirage Resorts after The Mirage opened in November 1989.

Following Kirk Kerkorian's $6.4 billion buyout of Mirage Resorts in May 2000, MGM Mirage operated the Downtown landmark until selling it in January 2004 for $215 million to young travel entrepreneurs Tim Poster and Thomas Breitling (Poster Financial Group), whose brief tenure inspired the Fox reality series The Casino. One year later, Houston restaurateur Tilman Fertitta's Landry's, Inc. bought the Golden Nugget in a $295 million cash-and-debt deal closed in September 2005. Fertitta invested over $300 million in expansions, opening The Tank(a $30 million, 200,000-gallon live shark aquarium bisected by a three-story clear acrylic waterslide) in 2006 and adding the 500-room Rush Tower at First and Carson Streets in November 2009, bringing total inventory above 2,400 rooms.