Found slide. Fremont Street, Las Vegas, around 1947. Somebody stood out there one night with a camera loaded with Kodachrome and got all of it. The Boulder Club tower on the left. The Eldorado Club in enormous glowing script across the brick building, a neon prospector hoisting a pickaxe at the end of the sign. And on the corner, in smaller letters, the Hotel Apache. Two signs in this frame are advertising faro. Faro Bank, the Eldorado ribbon says. The Heart of Las Vegas. Faro was the biggest gambling game in America in the 1800s, and by this night it was nearly dead. The Hotel Apache had opened in 1932, built by P.O. Silvagni, an Italian immigrant who held one of the concrete contracts on Hoover Dam and figured the dam workers would need somewhere to blow off steam on Saturday nights. His hotel had the first elevator in Las Vegas, the first air conditioned lobby, and the first carpeted casino in town. And here is the thing about this photograph. The Eldorado Club was downstairs in the Apache building, and in 1951 a Texas gambler named Benny Binion bought both of them. The Eldorado sign came down that spring. On August 14, 1951, the corner reopened as Binion's Horseshoe. Carpet instead of sawdust. Comps for every gambler, not just the high rollers. A $500 craps limit when nobody else in town would let you bet a tenth of that. Nineteen years later, the World Series of Poker started in that room. The Apache building is still standing at Fremont and 2nd. They reopened the hotel rooms in 2019 and kept the old name. You can sleep there tonight, right over the corner where all this neon used to burn. Parking was 25 cents. Enlarge this one big and read the small signs. And look at those cars!

One of my most significant found photo collections to date. A few hundred color Kodachromes of the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island. IN COLOR. Very few color slides of this event exist. I found what may be the largest known collection of these in existence. Kodachrome film had only been out since 1936. It was slow and expensive. The fair was built on a man-made island to celebrate the new Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge. They called it the Pageant of the Pacific. It ran in 1939 and 1940. Almost everything that survives is black and white. Charles Cushman shot some color frames that are now at Indiana University. OpenSFHistory has published six 1940 night color slides and a smaller number of daytime ones. A few others are in private hands. That is most of the known color record outside of this set. These came out of an estate sale in the Oakland hills. The Gayway with Sally Rand’s Nude Ranch and the sunburst lights down the middle of the street. The Tower of the Sun lit at night and reflected in the lagoon. The Court of Pacifica. The Japanese pavilion. Crowds in hats on the wide midways. Fountains and statues. The whole fair still sitting in the mounts. What a time to be alive in San Francisco. I am working through this collection but I've published the first 40 or so here (more to come): flickr.com/photos/thomashawk…