Page 102 – LIFE

Vintage Vegas: Scenes From a Desert Boomtown

December 30, 2019May 8, 2014 by

Of all the major destination towns in the U.S., Las Vegas might be the most perfectly, unashamedly transparent. No other city in North America, after all has for so long been so identified with one pursuit: namely, the heart-pounding, more-often-than-not-futile hunt for the improbable, near-mythic Big Score.

And the fact that Las Vegas resembles a gaudy neon mirage in the desert? Well, surely no more apt an image could apply to a place where dreams of riches, and occasionally of romance go to die.

But Las Vegas is also a place where dreams, large and small, are just as frequently born. Hotel and casino owners dream of founding (or furthering) their financial empires. Singers, dancers, comedians and magicians dream of performing night after night before rapt crowds. The unemployed from all over the U.S. dream of finding work.

In 1955, 50 years after Las Vegas was founded, LIFE magazine took a rather skeptical look at the boomtown and its prospects for growth in a cover story titled “Gambling Town Pushes Its Luck.” The Loomis Dean pictures in this gallery, meanwhile (many of which were never published) provide some wonderful visual reminders of how raw a place Las Vegas was in the mid-’50s, before the Rat Pack made the city its home away from home and decades before it would begin to reinvent itself as a family-friendly mecca.

Some of the pictures appeared in the June 20, 1955, issue of LIFE, in an article that described the city as “set for its biggest boom,” with some caveats:

In Las Vegas last week the temperature was up to a torrid 110 degrees and the townsfolk who operate the only large gambling center in the country welcomed the seasonable weather. With it they expected the usual bountiful summer crop of tourists trying out their luck and leaving their money behind. The sign of good times seemed everywhere. . . . But with all this a shadow of doubt fell across Las Vegas, a worry that the bloom it was set for has started to wilt.

In the past month, two new top-notch hotels opened. One was the $5 million Dunes, which lugged 120 slot machines in anticipation of the rush. The other was the Moulin Rouge, the first interracial hotel in Las Vegas, which welcomed whites and Negroes to its accommodations and gambling tables. It had Joe Louis as part-owner and host, and a lively, lovely chorus in its floor show.

Like a gambler on a prolonged winning streak, Las Vegas had the feeling its run of luck couldn’t end. For more than a decade, it had parlayed one prosperous year into a more prosperous next year and went into the expansion more in the spirit of hunch than of calculated economics. The opening of the new hotels and of what Las Vegas hoped would be a new era of money-making was opulent and promising. . . . But when the excitement of the opening died down, the town looked at its new places—where customers were scarce and the betting was light—and wondered: Has Vegas pushed its luck too far?

That question, of course, has come up repeatedly over the years, as the desert city has steadily grown from a 100-acre (40 hectare) railroad town in 1905 to a sprawling metropolis today. But no matter the odds, Las Vegas has thus far always seemed to have one more ace in the hole, one more trick up its sleeve to keep the lights on, the casino floors humming and the dreamers, the players and the suckers coming back over and over again.

Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.

Las Vegas, Nevada 1955.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Las Vegas, Nevada 1955

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Las Vegas, 1955. A little-used pool at one of the city’s newest hotels.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A billboard for the under-construction El Morocco Hotel, Las Vegas, 1955.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Las Vegas, 1955.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A billboard for the under-construction Tropicana, Las Vegas, 1955.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Las Vegas, 1955.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A prop slot machine backstage at the Royal Nevada Hotel and Casino.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Las Vegas, 1955.

Loomis DeanThe LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Las Vegas, 1955.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Idling croupiers (in shirtsleeves) dawdled behind their roulette tables because few customers were placing bets in The Dunes two weeks after opening night.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Las Vegas, 1955.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The crap tables at the Dunes were tried by Jake Freedman (center), the owner of the rival Sands club. He lost $10,000 before deciding his luck was off that night.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Las Vegas, Nevada 1955

Loomis Dean Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Las Vegas casino, 1955.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Las Vegas, 1955.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

New York Groovy: City Fashions from the Summer of 1969

August 12, 2021May 6, 2014 by

Summertime in pretty much any city is a different experience than any other season, but summer in New York is another world. Many of the people who can afford to escape Gotham in July and August usually do so, and even if their numbers are relatively small among the city’s eight million souls, the extra elbow room that their absence provides the rest of us on the streets, at the museums and in the parks, bars and restaurants lends the metropolis a far less frenetic vibe.

It’s not that the city’s unique energy vanishes; instead, it’s directed toward the pursuit of leisure—street fairs, picnics and plays in the parks, free concerts, people-watching rather than New Yorkers’ customary quests for money, power, fame, an apartment with two bathrooms. . .

In the summer, despite baking in the sweltering heat, encountering undefinable and often jarring aromas around every street corner and dealing with the constant prospect of citywide blackouts, New Yorkers give themselves license to slow down. To cease striving. To breathe.

In August 1969, meanwhile, LIFE magazine was busy celebrating not the season itself, but the eye-popping fashions that the “young people” which, judging by these pictures, meant anyone under the age of 40 were sporting during the summer months. In a cover story shot by photographer Vernon Merritt III, LIFE lauded “That New York Look” with an almost poetic zeal:

New York City is a costume party for the young this summer, a party taking place outdoors, on the streets and in the parks. Long hair, long legs. The party is not always elegant, but it is completely alive.

It isn’t really hard to tell the boys from the girls, even when they are both in bell-bottoms, and of course most boys don’t put shoe polish on their eyes. All are wearing what they want to to wear, from the shortest skirts to the longest skins.

How they look depends partly on where they go. The ferry is different from a Seventh Avenue lunch stand and very different from Central Park.

The look is not what New York calls sophisticated, but even so, it catches the eye. Many of the girls seem to get their kicks with makeup. They wear it anywhere absolutely anywhere.

The important thing is to express yourself. Depending on your talents you can do it with a 25-key soprano Melodica or a long, cool stare. You choose. The New York look is a celebration of the self.

Here, in recognition of the singular look and feel of that long-ago New York summer, LIFE.com presents a number of the photographs that ran in the “New York Look” article, as well as some other, atmospheric shots that did not run in LIFE.

Young couple with a balloon in Central Park, 1969.

Vernon Merritt III/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Young couple on the Staten Island Ferry, 1969.

Vernon Merritt III/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A couple on the street in New York, summer 1969.

Vernon Merritt III/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Young people at Bethesda Fountain in Central Park, 1969.

Vernon Merritt III/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

New York City, summer, 1969.

Vernon Merritt III/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Private party on the balcony of a New York City apartment building, summer 1969.

Vernon Merritt III/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

New York City, summer, 1969.

Vernon Merritt III/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Young people at Bethesda Fountain in Central Park, summer 1969.

Vernon Merritt III/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

New York City, summer, 1969.

Vernon Merritt III/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Hare Krishna devotees wore traditional saffron robes and chanted in a New York park, summer 1969.

Vernon Merritt III/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

New York City, summer, 1969.

Vernon Merritt III/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Central Park, 1969.

Vernon Merritt III/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Central Park, summer, 1969.

Vernon Merritt III/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

New York City, summer, 1969.

Vernon Merritt III/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

LIFE Magazine, Aug. 22, 1969.

LIFE Magazine

Political Fashion Statements From the 1952 Presidential Campaign

October 29, 2020May 6, 2014 by

These days, if you want to wear your politics on your sleeve, you don a campaign t-shirt. But in 1952, LIFE photographer Nina Leen captured models who were supporting presidential candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower in much grander fashion. As these photographs attest, wearing pins, gloves, stockings and clothing that declared “I Like Ike” illustrated that political statements can be fashionable, too.

Of course, we wouldn’t go so far as to declare that these fashions played a central role in Eisenhower’s landslide victory over Democrat Adlai Stevenson in November of that year. But they probably didn’t hurt.

Finally, a note about the fifth slide in this gallery, featuring a woman in a dress emblazoned with the phrase “Daft About Taft” — a reference to Sen. Robert Taft of Ohio, who challenged Eisenhower for the GOP nomination in 1952. It’s worth remembering that just because a slogan rhymes doesn’t mean that it one should use it — especially if the implication is that the candidate’s supporters might be a little cuckoo.

Liz Ronk, who edited this gallery, is the Photo Editor for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.

Political Fashion, ‘I Like Ike,’ 1952

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Eiffel Tower: A Paris Landmark Captured in a Classic Photo

January 17, 2020May 5, 2014 by

The popular French writer Guy de Maupassant (1850 – 1893) reportedly ate lunch in the Eiffel Tower’s restaurant every day for years—not because he loved the great iron monument but because, so the story goes, it was the only place in Paris where he could sit and not see the tower itself. Maupassant, like countless French artists and aestheticians of the late 19th century, despised Gustave Eiffel’s creation, seeing it as a vulgar eyesore and a blight on their beloved Parisian skyline.

Whatever. For the rest of the world, the Eiffel Tower is and has long been one of the singular architectural emblems anywhere on earth: a formidable, graceful, soaring structure that connotes Paris as surely and as indelibly as the Empire State Building, Il Duomo, Hagia Sophia and other enduring landmarks signify their own great, respective cities.

Here, LIFE considers the phenomenal edifice through a single picture: Dmitri Kessel’s classic 1948 portrait of La Dame de Fer as seen on a winter’s day.

Perhaps it’s the absence of a single, visible human form that lends Kessel’s photograph its timeless power. Maybe it’s the ill-defined look of the structure, almost phantasmal as it looms in the Parisian fog, that somehow draws the viewer even deeper into the scene—as if, given enough time, the fog itself might clear and, even as we watch, the spire might grow more defined in the stark winter light.

Whatever the source of this one picture’s abiding appeal, the allure of the tower itself remains undimmed 125 years after wondering, awestruck crowds first encountered what was then, and remained for the next four decades, the tallest manmade structure on the planet.

Eiffel Tower, 1948

Dmitri Kessel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Behind the Picture: ‘Dewey Defeats Truman’

November 6, 2020May 4, 2014 by

Triumph. That’s the look on President Harry Truman’s face. Sheer, unadulterated triumph. In fact, of the countless politics-related photographs made over, say, the past century, one would be hard-pressed to point to a more famous image than W. Eugene Smith‘s shot of an ebullient Truman holding aloft a copy of the Chicago Tribune emblazoned with the now-legendary (erroneous) headline: DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN.

The reason for the picture’s immortality? It’s not the headline itself although that titanic error is, in its own way, rather marvelous—the screw-up was the result of an early press time and a poor prediction. Instead, the picture endures because of the look of unabashed, in-your-face delight in Truman’s eyes.

First, a brief discussion of the ’48 election itself. In what is generally regarded as the greatest upset in American political history, Truman beat the heavily-favored Republican governor of New York, Thomas Dewey, by a substantial Electoral College margin, 303 to 189, but by fewer than three million votes in the popular vote. (The right-wing, stridently segregationist “Dixiecrat” nominee, Strom Thurmond, won four states—Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and his home state of South Carolina—and 39 electoral votes in 1948.)

A full two days after the election, the president was on his way back to Washington from his home in Independence, Mo., when his train stopped in St. Louis. There, someone handed Truman a two-day-old copy of the Tribune. (One version has a staffer serendipitously finding the paper under a seat in the station.)

Maybe Truman had already heard about the Republican-leaning Trib‘s embarrassing snafu, but he had not yet held a copy in his hands. Perhaps this was the first time he had any inkling of how huge and how hugely mistaken the headline actually was. However it shook out, in Smith’s photograph of that priceless moment, Truman’s elation upon coming face to face with the dead-wrong assertion of his defeat is positively palpable.

Seeing the image today, in the world of the 24/7 news cycle, it’s hard to believe that the photograph was not made on election night. After all, in an age of 24/7 news, when more and more media consumers get their breaking news via tweets and friends’ Facebook posts, two days can seem like a lifetime.

But the thrill evident in the face of the man holding that paper remains as indelible today as when it was captured all those years ago. It’s a defining image of more than a politician. The picture captures the feeling of sweet, improbable victory for a person who had been counted out too soon.

Harry Truman

A jubilant Harry Truman held up a Chicago newspaper emblazoned with the (erroneous) headline, “DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN,” St. Louis, November 4, 1948. (W. Eugene Smith / LIFE Picture Collection)

Amazin’: Remembering Tom Seaver and the Miracle Mets

July 29, 2021May 3, 2014 by

Tom Seaver, who died on Sept. 2, 2020 at age 75, won the first of his three Cy Young awards in 1969 as the ace of the Amazin’ Mets. For Seaver, that extraordinary season was the start of a Hall of Fame career that included 311 wins and 3,640 strikeouts. He is on a short list among the greatest pitchers of all time.

The ’69 Mets themselves maintain a special place in baseball culture. The team that had been so terrible since beginning play in 1962, routinely losing more than 100 games per season, improbably rallied to become World Series champion.

LIFE was along for the ride during that 1969 season, chronicling the exploits of Seaver—a young righty just discovering his ability to dominate batters—and also other characters of that miracle team. In its story LIFE called Seaver, then 24, “the team’s first superstar,” and the news of his death 51 years later had many proclaiming him the greatest player ever to wear the New York Mets uniform.

Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.

Ace pitcher Tom Seaver, 1969.

Co Rentmeester/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Tom Seaver won 25 games, the most in the majors, as the leader of the Miracle Mets in 1969.

Co Rentmeester/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Shortstop Bud Harrelson, 1969.

Co Rentmeester/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Third baseman Ed Charles, 1969 Mets.

Co Rentmeester/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

First baseman Donn Clendenon, 1969.

Co Rentmeester/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Outfielder Ron Swoboda, 1969.

Co Rentmeester/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Tom Seaver won 25 games, the most in the majors, as the leader of the Miracle Mets in 1969.

Co Rentmeester/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

1969 New York Mets.

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Manager Gil Hodges, 1969 Mets.

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Donn Clendenon, 1969

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Pitcher Jerry Koosman (No. 36) and teammates in the Mets dugout.

Co RentmeesterLife Pictures/Shutterstock

Outfielder Art Shamsky, 1969.

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Manager Gil Hodges (right), 1969 Mets.

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Ed Kranepool sliding in with the Pirates’ Jose Martinez in air, 1969.

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Tom Seaver, 1969.

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Manager Gil Hodges (right), 1969 Mets.

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Ed Charles scored past Pirates catcher Manny Sanguillen, 1969.

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Tom Seaver dominated for the Miracle Mets in 1969, going 25-7 and winning the first of his three Cy Young awards.

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Pittsburgh’s Willie Stargell slid against the Mets, 1969.

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Mets vs. Pirates, 1969.

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Donn Clendenon, 1969

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Ed Charles, 1969 Mets.

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From left to right: outfielder Tommie Agee, first baseman Donn Clendennon, shortstop Bud Harrelson, and outfielder Ron Swoboda.

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Tom Seaver, 1969.

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Catcher Jerry Grote, 1969.

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Catcher J. C. Martin, 1969 Mets.

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From left to right: coach Yogi Berra, pitcher Tom Seaver, shortstop Al Weis, 1969.

Co Rentmeester/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

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Amazin’: Remembering Tom Seaver and the Miracle Mets

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