Chapter 12The Dusty Nickel Hotel & Casino was a throwback to another era. Positioned a couple of blocks southeast of Fremont, the local businessmen who built it in the early 1970s believed it would help revitalize the area to better compete with the rapidly expanding Las Vegas Strip. They took a property that was once part of Vegas’s first train station dating back to the early 1900s and turned it into an eighteen-floor luxury casino with close to eight hundred rooms. But twenty years later, the Strip commanded over 80 percent of the city’s casino market, and hotels like the Dusty Nickel had faded into the background of the nostalgia surrounding the downtown area’s main drag of neon signs and blinding exteriors.
Though the business was still in operation, its luster and charm had long sin
