Moulin Rouge site + Historic Westside School
For six months in 1955, the most integrated room in America. The building is gone; what it did is not.
Key facts
- The Moulin Rouge opened May 24, 1955 at 900 W Bonanza Rd as the first racially integrated hotel-casino in Las Vegas — Black and white patrons and performers together.
- On March 26, 1960, the "Moulin Rouge Agreement," brokered there with the NAACP's Dr. James McMillan, desegregated the Las Vegas Strip's hotels, casinos and showrooms.
- After fires in 2003 and 2009, the remaining Moulin Rouge tower/structure was demolished July 22, 2010 — the site today is essentially a vacant lot and marker, not an intact building.
- The Moulin Rouge's Betty Willis–designed neon sign survives at the Neon Museum (moved there for storage before the 2009 fire).
- Nearby, the Historic Westside School (330 W Washington Ave, built 1923, additions through 1948) is the oldest remaining school building in Las Vegas; the City restored it (~$12.5M, completed 2015) and it now houses community and preservation offices.
Narration transcript
Coming up on your left, that open ground on Bonanza is one of the most important empty lots in Nevada. This was the Moulin Rouge, and for about six months in 1955, it may have been the most integrated room in America. Black and white, on the same casino floor, at the same tables, watching the same show — at a time when the Strip allowed nothing of the kind.
It didn't last as a business. But five years later, in March of 1960, civil-rights leaders and casino owners sat down right here and signed the agreement that finally desegregated the Strip's hotels and showrooms. A shuttered hotel on the Westside is where the Strip was forced open.
Now — you're looking at a vacant lot on purpose. Fires took the building, and the last of it was demolished in 2010. Don't picture a hotel; picture what happened on this ground. Its beautiful neon sign did survive — it's out at the Neon Museum, on the other Las Vegas tour.
And you did pass one survivor just back there: the Historic Westside School on Washington, from 1923 — the oldest school building in the city, restored and still in use.
Head back toward downtown now, south and east, to a quarter built out of the buildings everyone else gave up on — the Arts District.