VEGAS MYTHS BUSTED: The Traveling Welcome to Las Vegas Sign
Last month, we busted the myth that the Las Vegas Strip has official boundaries, In that edition, we mentioned that the Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas (WTFLV) signal could receive moved several miles southward to conciliate the Strip’s inevitable hereafter expansion.
Why didn’t we reference the fact that the signal already had been moved southward since its 1959 installation, for the same reason? Because that’s a myth.
Vital Sign
Sometime inward the summer of 1959, the WTFLV contract was installed by the horse opera Electric Displays ratify company, best known as Western Neon. The idea to officially welcome motorists from Southern Golden State came from the company’s salesman, Ted Rogich, and the figure was drawn by its commercial artist, Betty Willis.
They wanted something that would key Las Vegas and live as exciting and welcoming as they could get,” Thomas Willis told a blogger for the Neon Museum shortly before her 2015 death. “We position flashing lights, chasing neon, and everything we could to lay sue into it. The unit theme of the sign up was to make up people sense welcome.”
Primary pattern stirring came from the subscribe at the Riviera. The letters W-E-L-C-O-M-E were presented as Ag dollars, the sort that came pouring come out of a one-armed bandit political machine inward the jackpot everybody hoped for at the time.
Instead of the Riv sign’s triangle, Thomas Willis went with a received hotel Florida key watch guard as her sign’s main shape.
The WTFLV signal was installed next to the old entranceway to McCarran Field, today’s Harry Thomas Reid International Airport. This location was chosen because it happened to be the southernmost cutoff for gambling casino resort development at the time. Pretty practically everything beyond that was untouched desert.
However, development has moved southward along Las Vegas Boulevard in the decades since. So, some people wrongly assume, the sign up must have got moved on with it.
Fake News
The myth of the traveling WTFLV sign up was number 1 reported as fact past a 1998 story published in the Las Vegas Review-Journal that was ne'er retracted or uploaded to the internet. Yet, it was influential plenty to garner a extension inward the sign’s enrolment make for its 2009 designation with the National Register of Historic Places.
“There feature been reports that the sign on was moved,” the strain read, noting that in that location was no more documentation with Joe Clark County or YESCO (the sign’s electric current owner) verifying this.
In fact, in that location is photographic grounds proving that it was ne'er moved. You simply get to cognise where and how to looking at for it.
Mandalay Bay stands 0.4 miles, or 2,112 feet, to the northwards of the contract today. So did the Hacienda casino hotel, which was dismantled on Dec. 31, 1996, to establish Mandalay Bay.
In the desktop of the world-class known photo of the WTFLV sign, snapped past an terra incognita holidaymaker inward September 1959, the Hacienda looks farther out than the Mandalay Bay does inward modern font photos. But that’s only if an phantasy created because the original Hacienda was a three-story structure, while Mandalay Bay is to a greater extent than 14 times taller.
This proves that the WTFLV subscribe was installed inward the exact location where it stands today, because if the signalise were ever moved, the Hacienda would come out closer inwards the older photo.
Myth Understood
As with many myths, this one flourished in a scarcity of information nearly its subject.
In fact, the reason we had to drop a line that the sign was installed “sometime inwards the summer of 1959” is that no more one knows for sure when this case happened, since it wasn’t considered an case at all.
Back then, no i knew the WTFLV signalise would become the world(a) ikon that it is today, second in signalise celebrity only when to Hollywood’s. So no more ceremonies were held to commemorate its groundbreaking, completion, unveiling, or lighting.
There aren’t yet any known photos of its construction.
After its favourable reception past the Mark Wayne Clark County Commission on May 5, 1959, no cite was yet made of the contract past any newsprint until months after it was already upward and flashing.
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