Is Las Vegas Memorabilia Valuable?
I believe that Las Vegas memorabilia is going to increase significantly in value over the coming years. Here are some of my reasons:
these vintage items are no longer produced and used (see history below).
they represent a specific period in a casino’s history, which will never be repeated.
there is now extensive media coverage about the ‘new’ Las Vegas as a destination, Poker tournaments, many television programs and Internet sites about “how it used to be”. I know when I watch these programs; I see some of my collectibles and say “I’ve got that one!”
over 30 million people visit Las Vegas yearly and there are many signs that these number will continue to expand with new and repeat visitors.
many visitors are now, or will be, collectors of Las Vegas memorabilia.
I was there recently and searched around some local antique and collectors’ stores and saw very few ashtrays and other Las Vegas memorabilia. Those that I did find had prices 3-10 times more expensive than what they can be purchased for on ebay.
when these items (ashtrays, postcards, menus, etc., etc.) were produced, the target audience was a tiny percentage of what it is today and will be in the future; so proportionately there were not many produced.
the massive expansion of the Internet has seen the number of collectors growing exponentially and their appetite for collectibles will only continue to grow. Las Vegas collectibles will continue to be among the more popular collectibles. They are affordable, all have an interesting story behind them and more and more people have been to Las Vegas in person.
many ashtrays get tossed away or broken when family members are cleaning up after a loved one has passed, resulting in a dwindling supply of these great ashtrays.
A Little History Of Earlier Las Vegas
Legalized gambling began in Nevada during the Great Depression in the same year that construction started on the Hoover Dam. With the Union Pacific Railroad development, legal gambling and construction of the Hoover Dam, jobs and money were prevalent in Las Vegas; sheltering it from the effects of the Depression.
World War II stalled major resort growth in Las Vegas, but the seeds for future expansion had been planted in 1941 when hotelman Tommy Hull built the El Rancho Vegas Hotel-Casino. During World War II, Nellis Air Force Base grew into a key military installation and many key military personnel assigned to Nellis during World War II later returned as civilians to take up permanent residency in Las Vegas.
The success of the El Rancho Vegas triggered a small building boom in the late 1940s including construction of several hotel- casinos fronting on the two-lane highway that evolved into today's Las Vegas Strip. Early hotels included the Last Frontier, Thunderbird and Club Bingo.
The El Rancho Vegas was razed by fire on June 17, 1960. The most celebrated of the early resorts was the Flamingo Hotel, built by mobster Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel. The Flamingo with a giant pink neon sign and replicas of pink flamingos on the lawn, opened on New Year's Eve 1946. While the El Rancho Vegas and other 1940s resorts followed a western ranch-styled theme, the Flamingo was modeled after resort hotels in Miami. It is now known as the Flamingo Hilton.
Resort building continued to accelerate in Las Vegas in the 1950s. Wilbur Clark opened the Desert Inn in 1950 and 2 years later Milton Prell opened the Sahara Hotel on the site of the old Club Bingo. The Sands Hotel opened that same year. Those hotel names have survived but the properties have undergone numerous ownership changes.
In 1955, the Riviera Hotel became the first Strip high-rise at nine stories. Previously, Wilbur Clark's Desert Inn had offered guests the highest unobstructed panoramic view of the Las Vegas Valley from the resort's third-floor Skyroom, a cocktail and dancing haunt of visitors, residents and celebrities.
Other resorts that opened during the building boom begun in the 1950s included the Royal Nevada, Dunes, Hacienda, Tropicana and Stardust on the Strip and the Downtown Fremont.
Moulin Rouge Hotel-Casino opened in 1955 at a time when blacks were not welcomed guests at Strip casinos and black entertainers were required to live off- premise while entertaining Strip audiences. The Moulin Rouge, frequented by all races, was built to accommodate the growing black population. .
When the El Rancho Vegas was the only resort on the Las Vegas Strip in 1941, singers, comedians, strippers, instrumentalists, dancers and a wide variety of performers were booked to entertain hotel guests in the resort's small, intimate showroom. The hotel-casinos that followed copied the successful star format for a number of years.
The Stardust was the first hotel to break with the star policy by debuting a stage spectacular as its main entertainment feature. The resort imported the Lido de Paris from France. It was acclaimed by critics as a more spectacular version than the Paris original. The Lido had a 31-year run and was replaced in 1991 with the current new spectacular entitled Enter The Night.
The Dunes, which disappeared from the skyline in a fiery, dusty staged implosion in 1993, engaged Minsky's Follies in 1957, the first time that topless showgirls debuted on the Las Vegas Strip.
The Tropicana bought the American rights to the spectacular Folies Bergere. It remains a showroom favorite to this day. Backstage tours are a hot Las Vegas attraction.
During the 50s and 60s, casino lounges also provided continuous entertainment from dusk to dawn at no charge to the customer except the cost of a drink. These lounges, which became major entertainment attractions in their own right, spawned the names of Don Rickles, Buddy Hackett, Shecky Greene, Alan King, Louis Prima and Keely Smith, the Mary Kaye Trio and many others.
In the initial years of the Las Vegas Strip, "no" was a big word -- no cover, no minimum, no state speed limit, no sales tax, no waiting period for marriages, no state income tax and no regulation of gambling as it is known today. In modern times about the only "no's" remaining are no state income tax and no waiting period to obtain a marriage license. No cover charge is still the rule in some casino lounges.
The state legislature has imposed sales taxes and strict gambling regulation laws. Nevada gambling styles, games and machines evolved to keep pace with more sophisticated, affluent players. Baccarat, known in France as chemin de fer, appeared in high-roller Strip casinos. Keno writers no longer used black indelible ink brushes to mark tickets. Mechanical slot machines, once affectionately termed "one- armed bandits," became antique collector items in the age of electronic gaming.
Blackjack dealers no longer dealt single decks but switched to "shoes" that held multiple decks. Silver dollars, once the coin of the realm in Nevada, disappeared and were replaced in casinos with silver-dollar-size tokens. In the 60s, multiple coin slot machines debuted. Mechanical penny and nickel slot machines that took one coin at a time evolved into the popular computerized dollar slot machines capable of accepting multiple tokens simultaneously. High-roller slot players today can find machines that accept $500 tokens. The size of jackpots grew from a few hundred dollars to $10 million dollar progressive jackpots paid on a computerized statewide network of slot machines.
In the 70s, video machines that substituted television screens for reels, were introduced. Computerized slot machines now feature poker, keno, blackjack, bingo and craps. Some slot machines accept credit-card style gambling. Casinos continue their evolution toward high-tech wagering with every applicable breakthrough in modern technology.
I always try and have some casino and other Las Vegas memorabilia available for sale in my ebay Store
. Have a peek!
Please be sure to add me to your favorites list and check out my other items!
Thanks .... Ron
) 
