UNLV / Maryland Parkway

The boomtown grows up — a university on what was a two-lane dirt road.

Key facts

UNLV began in 1957 as the Southern Division of the University of Nevada (Reno) — a branch campus; roots trace to a 1951 UNR extension program taught in a Las Vegas high school.
The first building opened on campus September 10, 1957 (later named Maude Frazier Hall, designed by architect Walter Zick) after the Regents chose an 80-acre parcel here in 1957.
When the campus was sited, Maryland Parkway was a two-lane dirt road on the edge of town — the university and its main street grew up together.
It was renamed Nevada Southern University, won autonomy in 1968, and became the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in 1969; the campus technically sits in the town of Paradise.

Narration transcript

You're driving the length of Maryland Parkway now, and on both sides the campus of UNLV spreads out — tens of thousands of students, a law school, a hotel-college the whole world trains at. Ordinary university scenery. But hold onto one image.

When this campus was founded in 1957, it wasn't a university at all — it was a single building, a branch of the university up in Reno, and the road you're on right now, Maryland Parkway, was a two-lane dirt track at the raw edge of town. The very first classes had actually met a few years earlier in a Las Vegas high school.

That's the whole story of this valley in miniature: it grew up fast. In just over a decade that one building became a full, independent university — UNLV — in 1969. The boomtown had decided to become a real city, and a real city needs a campus of its own.

Stay on Maryland, then swing west toward Flamingo — our last stop is where Las Vegas met the atom.