LAS VEGAS (FOX5) — People all around the world have heard of the Las Vegas Strip, but very few know how the four-mile stretch of Las Vegas Boulevard got its name. Legend traces the moniker back to the city’s earliest days and gives a shady former cop the credit.
“McAfee had been an LA cop, and may we say a crooked LA cop, he was involved in all kinds of vice in southern California,” says UNLV history professor Michael Green.
Guy McAfee is the man urban legend credits with giving the world-famous Las Vegas Strip its name.
McAfee learned a lot about illegal gambling while working vice for the Los Angeles Police Department. In the late 1930s, he decided to put that knowledge into practice in Nevada.
“He bought a place called the Pair-O-Dice, which had opened in 1930 on the highway between Las Vegas and Los Angeles.”
First, McAfee changed the name to the “91 Club” for Highway 91 – the road that linked Vegas to L.A. Then, he came up with a new moniker for a very specific stretch of that highway.
“And the story is that he was looking at the lights from the little clubs along Highway 91and the lights from the cars coming in and out of town, and it apparently reminded of a street he knew in southern California: the Sunset Strip.”
The nickname has stuck for more than 80 years, as has one point of debate.
“One of the questions is where does the Strip begin and end, and it keeps edging out. But when Bob Stupak was building the Stratosphere, he said, ‘Well, I’m moving the Strip a quarter of a mile north,’ and that was Bob Stupak, he would do that sort of thing,” says Green.
Clark County sees no such wiggle room. It says the Strip officially starts at Sahara Avenue and ends at the Welcome to Las Vegas Sign. Green sees only one problem with those boundaries.
“Just bear in mind, when the sign says ‘Welcome to Las Vegas,’ you aren’t in the City of Las Vegas, and in the spirit of the original place that Guy McAfee bought, you’re actually in Paradise.”
Green tells us early hotel-casinos deliberately built their properties just south of the city line to escape paying taxes and municipal fees. This led to the incorporation of townships like Paradise and later Winchester.
Copyright 2025 KVVU. All rights reserved.
