The Westside Strip
Jackson AvenueEvery club, every address, what happened to each one.
For roughly thirty years, Jackson Avenue in West Las Vegas was the one place in the valley where Black residents could own a business, buy a drink, and hear music without being turned away. The city established the commercial district in 1942, from D to F streets along Jackson and Van Buren. Locals called it the Westside Strip. It was also called the Black Strip.
Most accounts of the Westside name three or four clubs and move on. This page lists every one we can source, with its street address, the years it operated, who is documented as having been there, and what stands on the site today. Where sources disagree, both are shown.
The clubs
Ordered by street. Addresses are as given in the sources listed at the bottom of this page.
Cotton Club
Moe Taub held the original license, for beer, slot machines and race horse keno. It was one of the earliest Black clubs licensed to operate away from downtown. Westside operators Jodie Cannon took it over in the late 1940s and Uvalde Caperton ran it through the late 1950s.
Sarann Knight Preddy worked here as a keno writer in the club's early years. In 1950 she became the first Black woman in Nevada to hold a gaming license, and in 1990 she and her husband Joe bought the Moulin Rouge. A barmaid, Katherine Joseph, remembered waiting on Pearl Bailey here.
The building outlived the club by decades. It was operating as the Cotton Bowl by 1962. Jimmie Love, a former Nevada Test Site kitchen worker, bought it in 1970 and reopened it as Love's Lounge, adding a new facade in 1978. Lon Chaney briefly revived the old name as C's Cotton Club and Lounge, with an opening night advertised for 9 October 1987.
TodayThe building still stands at 500 Jackson Avenue. It is True Vine Baptist Church.
Sources disagreeVintage Las Vegas dates the opening to 1943. Claytee D. White, director of UNLV's Oral History Research Center, dates it to January 1944. We have not resolved it.
Green Lantern, Round-Up, Club Ebony
One address, three names in rapid succession. The Green Lantern ran from January 1945 to 1947. The Round-Up Casino took the room from January 1947 to 1948. Club Ebony followed from 1948 to 1949.
The turnover is the point. Nightclub licences on the Westside were held by people operating on thin capital in a segregated economy, and rooms changed hands fast. The stretch of Jackson between 500 and 501 had four different clubs running inside a decade.
Documented byClaytee D. White, "Historic Black Vegas: Jackson Avenue Nightclubs in the 1940s."
Town Tavern
A bar and casino, and in the late 1950s the destination for Black entertainers headlining segregated hotels on the Strip. Documented performers and visitors include Louis Armstrong, Pearl Bailey, Dorothy Dandridge, Sammy Davis Jr., Cab Calloway, The Ink Spots and Little Milton.
The City of Las Vegas calls the New Town Tavern, at Jackson and F, the sole survivor of the Jackson Street commercial district's peak years.
TodayStill standing. The City's Pioneer Trail lists it as the last remaining business of that era on the street.
Carver House
A five-story hotel and casino, the most ambitious building on the street. It stood unfinished through the late 1950s and finally opened in July 1961 under the ownership of First Western bank. It advertised craps, keno and liberal slots, and ran a showroom with acts including Paul Bryant, Norris Patterson and Patience Valentine.
The Carver House was listed in The Negro Travelers' Green Book from 1962 to 1966. For Black travelers and entertainers, it, the Jackson Hotel, the Cove and the neighborhood's boarding houses were where you could actually get a room.
It became The Cove from 1965 to 1966. Fire damaged the building in July 1989 and it was demolished soon after.
TodayGone.
Brown Derby
Not on Jackson itself. The Jackson corridor spilled onto D, E, F and Monroe, and the Derby was part of it. In its first year of operation it was the site of a fight between a group of Black soldiers and local men. It may have gone dark between 1947 and 1950 before running on into the 1970s.
NoteWikipedia states that when Sarann Knight Preddy arrived in Las Vegas in 1942, the Harlem Club was the only club on the Westside, with the Brown Derby following in 1944. Claytee D. White dates the Harlem Club to January 1944 as well. The two accounts cannot both be right.
El Morocco Club
Ran a decade, closed, then came back three separate times: 1957 to 1958, 1959 to 1960, and 1963 to 1964. Like the 501 Jackson rooms, its stop-start history is a record of how hard these businesses were to keep open.
Harlem Club
The shortest-lived of the group, and by one account the first. It opened the same month as the Cotton Club and was gone within about twelve months.
Smokey Joe's Club Alabama
Open for roughly two months. It is listed here because it existed and almost nowhere records it.
Moulin Rouge
The first integrated hotel and casino in Las Vegas. It ran six months. Entertainers from the Strip and from Hollywood came to its showroom, where Black and white patrons mixed freely, which was not legal practice anywhere else in the city.
On 26 March 1960, civic leaders and NAACP officials met here and agreed to desegregate the Las Vegas hotels. It is the single most consequential room in the neighborhood's history.
Its sign was designed by Betty Willis, who also designed the Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign. The sign survived and is at the Neon Museum. The buildings did not: fire in 2003, again in 2009, and twice in 2017, with demolition approved in 2010.
TodayThe site is empty. It has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1992.
A correction worth makingSeveral sources, including Google's own AI summary of the Historic Westside, describe the Moulin Rouge as the nation's first integrated hotel-casino and say it was destroyed by a fire in 2003. The National Register nomination says first in Las Vegas. And there were four fires, not one. We use the National Register's wording.
Where they stayed
The clubs existed because the hotels would not have them. That is the whole reason this street mattered.
Boarding houses and the Green Book
The City of Las Vegas states it plainly: Black entertainers were not allowed to stay at the Strip hotels where they performed in the 1940s and 1950s. Mrs. Genevieve Harrison opened her guest house in 1942 to take them in. Nat King Cole stayed there. In one week in 1949 the house held Eddie "Rochester" Anderson, singer Bob Parrish, the Edwards Sisters, the Jubalaires and Arthur Lee Simpkins.
Josephine Baker, performing at the Last Frontier in 1952, came to the Westside because that is where she could find a beauty shop that would take her.
The Carver House, the Jackson Hotel and the Cove carried Green Book listings. That is what the Westside was for.
What is still standing
Of everything on this page, two buildings survive.
Two
500 Jackson Avenue, the Cotton Club, now True Vine Baptist Church. And the New Town Tavern at Jackson and F, which the City calls the sole survivor of the district's peak.
The Carver House burned and was demolished. The Moulin Rouge burned four times and was demolished. Everything else is an address and a date.
Sources
Every claim above comes from one of these. Nothing on this page is inferred.
- City of Las Vegas Arts Commission and Department of Planning, Las Vegas Pioneer Trail
- City of Las Vegas, Westside Timeline
- Claytee D. White, Historic Black Vegas: Jackson Avenue Nightclubs in the 1940s, Las Vegas Black Image
- National Register of Historic Places, Moulin Rouge Hotel, reference 92001701
- The Neon Museum, Short Lived But Long Remembered
- Las Vegas Review-Journal, Historic Jackson Avenue once was Las Vegas' Westside Strip
- UNLV News Center, My Nevada 5: The Jackson Street Five
- Vintage Las Vegas, Cotton Club at 500 Jackson Avenue
- Spinetti's Gaming, The Carver House Hotel and Casino and The Cove