old las vegas - the 4 queens

If you were coming to Las Vegas in 1977 you would definitely be heading to casinos in the downtown area to play. There wasn’t much on the strip for the working man who was coming to Vegas to play. If you were the superstitious type, you might insist on trying your hand in the casino called 4 Queens. That would be a winning hand in poker wouldn’t it?

The 4 Queens is representative of old Las Vegas. The Las Vegas before big corporate conglomerates took over and started building overpriced rooms in glitzy casinos with fancy sounding Italian names and buildings shaped like pyramids. In the heyday of the 4 Queens if you cheated at the tables they didn’t call the cops on you. This was old Vegas baby. They took you out back and beat the crap out of you and let you know that if they ever saw you again it was going to be worse.

These days the 4 Queens is forever enshrined in the part of downtown Las Vegas that has become known as the Fremont Street Experience. The streets have been closed in under a dome and casinos like 4 Queens, Binion’s Horseshoe, Fitzgerald’s and others are forever locked in time underneath a laser light show that reminds you of all the reasons you came to Vegas in the first place. When you walk through the Fremont Street experience it’s like a combination of New Orleans Mardi Gras and the Museum of Casino and Las Vegas history. There are so many things to see and do. I highly recommend it to anyone coming here for the first time or the hundredth time.

I took this picture in August of 2001 when my mother and I decided to go down and experience Fremont street for ourselves. We didn’t see any whores (which Fremont street is also famous for) but we saw a lot of old Las Vegas casinos and stores that have been there for a long time. I enjoyed it and I think you will to.