Girls of Glitter Gulch Gentlemen’s Club, Las Vegas, District Made Ladies Tee

Venue History

Girls of Glitter Gulch was hard to miss. For 25 years, from 1991 to 2016, the topless club sat on Fremont Street in downtown Las Vegas, right in the middle of one of the city’s most visible tourist corridors. The club occupied the 20–22 Fremont Street building complex near Main Street, in spaces that had once been home to the Golden Goose Casino and the neighboring Glitter Gulch Casino. Owner Herb Pastor combined the two properties in late 1991 and turned them into one of Fremont Street’s more unusual, and controversial, attractions. The timing made the club especially contentious. City leaders were trying to reshape Fremont Street into a cleaner, more family-friendly destination, and a topless club beneath some of the area’s most famous neon signs did not exactly fit that vision. Still, Girls of Glitter Gulch stayed put. Over time, whether people liked it or not, it became part of the texture of the Fremont Street Experience. Its most memorable feature was Vegas Vickie, the towering neon cowgirl installed above the property in 1980. Designed by Chuck Barnard of AD-ART, Vickie sat high above the street in a cowboy hat, boots, and fringed Western outfit. Her raised leg originally kicked, making her a playful counterpart to nearby Vegas Vic. When Pastor opened Girls of Glitter Gulch, he kept the sign in place, and Vickie helped give the club an identity that was impossible to separate from Fremont Street itself. Inside, it operated like a traditional gentlemen’s club, but its location made it stand out. Customers, tourists, casino visitors, and passersby all moved through the same stretch of Fremont Street. That mix, adult entertainment set against casinos, souvenir shops, bars, street performers, and the polished canopy of the Fremont Street Experience, was a big part of what made the place so distinctive. The end came in 2016, when Derek and Greg Stevens bought Girls of Glitter Gulch and several nearby properties as part of a larger downtown redevelopment plan. The club closed for good on June 27, 2016. By the following year, the old buildings were coming down to make way for Circa Resort & Casino. Vegas Vickie was saved. After YESCO restored the sign, she returned in 2020 inside Circa as the centerpiece of Vegas Vickie’s cocktail lounge. Today, she still kicks her leg just a short distance from the spot where she watched over Fremont Street for decades.