20 Old-School Las Vegas Photos From the 1950s and ’60s

The Stardust opened in 1958 with one of the Strip’s most ambitious signs, a sweeping atomic-age design filled with stars, planets, and cosmic lettering. Installation photographs show workers assembling a roadside landmark that looked ready to advertise gambling across the solar system. Its space-age imagery matched an era obsessed with rockets and modernity. Long before digital screens, Las Vegas built enormous mechanical constellations and trusted thousands of bulbs to keep the future blinking every night.