You won’t have to go far to find the Moulin Rouge. Just don’t look for it amid the rubble on Bonanza Road that for a fleeting few months in 1955 was America’s first interracial casino.

It’s not there. At times even its greatest admirers and defenders must wonder whether it was ever really there at all.

The Moulin Rouge these days is a ghost most easily conjured on the Internet, where an old Life magazine cover and article capture the excitement of its brief time in the spotlight. Look a little harder and you’ll find Moulin Rouge postcards, which have become collector’s items. For the studious, there’s documentary filmmaker Stan Armstrong’s spirited and informative “The Misunderstood Legend of the Las Vegas Moulin Rouge.”

Those seeking some history will benefit from Earnest N. Bracey’s “The Moulin Rouge and Black Rights in Las Vegas.” Anyone wanting to catch the scent of the Rouge’s distinctive urban perfume will enjoy Charles Fleming’s “The Ivory Coast” and Bill Moody’s “The Sound of the Trumpet.”

Reams of newsprint have been written about the Moulin Rouge. Rank sentimentalists and hardened preservationists have shed countless tears over its fleeting promise and careworn apparition.

Not only did the Moulin Rouge fail to rise and return to its former glory, but like a character from “The Walking Dead” it slid into ever-deeper decrepitude with each passing year. The 15-acre site became a favorite hangout of dream hustlers and the homeless. Fires in 2003 and 2009 ensured that any attempt to restore it would be a dream deferred.

Now there’s a real possibility the property at 900 W. Bonanza at last will return to a useful purpose. Clark County has placed a $5 million bid on the property, which is in receivership, with a plan to build a Family Services center on it. That’s not flashy, but if comes to fruition the haunted ground might finally start contributing something more than nostalgia and blight to West Las Vegas.

Filmmaker Armstrong is a Moulin Rouge aficionado and knows its characters and story as well as anyone, but he’s more than ready to see its blighted site transformed. His parents moved to Las Vegas from San Francisco the year the Moulin Rouge made magazine covers, booming for a few weeks and then busting out. Its operators wanted to create an integrated “Harlem West” feel in a segregated Las Vegas at a time the Strip’s black entertainers couldn’t sleep in the hotels they headlined.

“It was ahead of its time, and it’s too bad that it wasn’t given a chance to really grow,” Armstrong says. “The legend is always a great thing, and I think people mentioned in the documentary how Tallulah Bankhead came in one night, and then the Rat Pack had to go to a new place that was kind of chic and bold.”

They came, they partied, they sprinkled a little hipster pizzazz. But they didn’t stay. The new club smell didn’t last, and the star-gazing didn’t cut it at the bottom line.

The Moulin Rouge went out of business and, like a rubbed-out Bugsy Siegel, became a Las Vegas legend that easily eclipsed reality.

Lest anyone accuse Armstrong of being too sentimental, he says, “I don’t want it to be just another old deserted post card. That time and era are gone. Let’s learn about the Moulin Rouge through history books and documentaries, but let’s move on.”

In the harsh light of a Bonanza Road morning, with poverty huddled on the sidewalk and so many local families struggling and dreaming of the day they grab a piece of prosperity in the new Las Vegas, that sounds like excellent advice.

 

 John L. Smith is a longtime Las Vegas journalist and author. Contact him at [email protected]. On Twitter: @jlnevadasmith.