The Golden Gate stands at 1 Fremont Street, on the corner of Main, where it has been since January 1906. Las Vegas was eight months old. The railroad had auctioned the townsite lots the previous May, and John F. Miller, who bought the corner lot, put up a tent hotel and then, within the year, a two-story building of concrete block and stone. He called it the Hotel Nevada. Rooms were a dollar a night.
It is the oldest hotel in the city and the oldest continuously operating one. The original building is still the core of the property, under a century of additions.
Number 1
The Hotel Nevada received the city’s first telephone in 1907. Its number was 1. The hotel’s current marketing makes much of this, and the claim holds: the Consolidated Power and Telephone Company’s first Las Vegas exchange assigned it.
In 1931, the year Nevada relegalized casino gambling and the Hoover Dam project began bringing workers through town, the hotel was renamed the Sal Sagev, which is Las Vegas spelled backward. The casino that opened on the ground floor that year has operated since, under the Sal Sagev name and then, from 1955, as the Golden Gate, when a group of investors from San Francisco bought the property and renamed it for their city.
The shrimp cocktail
The San Francisco group brought a dish with them. In 1959 the Golden Gate began serving a shrimp cocktail in a tulip glass for fifty cents, and kept it on the menu at that price until 1991, when it went to ninety-nine cents. The property has sold tens of millions of them, by its own count, and still serves it, now at a few dollars, at the deli counter. For decades it was the single best-known item of food downtown and the thing visitors told each other to go and have.
The Stevens years
Derek Stevens and his brother Greg bought a stake in the Golden Gate in 2008 and later took control. They renovated the original rooms, added a five-story tower on the Main Street side in 2012 that brought the room count to 122, and expanded the casino into the adjacent former Las Vegas Club space in 2017. The casino’s center bar, where dealers work in costume on a raised platform, dates from that expansion.
Stevens went on to buy Fitzgeralds across the street, rename it The D, and build Circa on the Las Vegas Club site. The Golden Gate remains the smallest of his three properties and the one with the oldest fabric: parts of the 1906 building are visible in the lobby and in the original rooms, which still have the dimensions of a railroad hotel.
What survives
The hotel keeps a small display of its history near the front desk: photographs, the telephone story, a menu with the fifty-cent cocktail. The building’s exterior on Fremont has been refaced several times, but the footprint is the 1906 one. In a city that has demolished nearly every structure of its first fifty years, the Golden Gate is one of three downtown casino buildings that date from before the Second World War. The other two are the El Cortez and Binion’s Hotel Apache.