Monte Carlo Club, Las Vegas, Ladies Cotton Tee

Venue History

The Monte Carlo Club at 15 Fremont Street, Las Vegas, occupies a modest yet pivotal place in downtown gaming history. Opened in 1945, this was the first casino venture of Wilbur Clark—who would later become a major player in Las Vegas as the developer of the Las Vegas Strip’s Desert Inn. The club’s earliest incarnation at the same address had been the Northern Club (1912–43) then the Turf Club (1943–45). In 1945, Clark and partners leased the site, incorporated the Monte Carlo Club, and added the full gaming profile: roulette, craps, blackjack, poker, and a 24-hour cocktail lounge. Under Clark’s initial leadership, the Monte Carlo represented the transition of Fremont Street from informal gambling venues into legal, modernized downtown casinos. Clark sold his interest around 1949 and moved on to launch the Desert Inn, but the Monte Carlo continued under new ownership. The property served as a casino until approximately 1956, after which it operated as a bar & restaurant and then underwent later transformations—including Denny’s, Sam’s Roast Beef, Coin Castle Casino, and La Bayou Casino—before the building was eventually demolished in the mid-1960s. Though its lifespan as a full-blown casino was brief, the Monte Carlo Club’s legacy lies in its early role and in Clark’s beginnings. It illustrates the era when downtown Las Vegas still housed small-scale gaming houses, predecessor to the mega-resorts of later decades. Today, the site’s modern presence is folded into the footprint of the Golden Gate Hotel & Casino, but the records—held at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Special Collections—preserve the original casino’s corporate documents, incorporation paperwork and letterhead from 1944-57. For vintage-Vegas enthusiasts, the Monte Carlo Club is a hidden chapter: small in scale, but big in its symbolic importance as the first Wilbur Clark casino, and as evidence of how Fremont Street’s gaming identity evolved in the mid-1940s.