Springs Preserve’s new Boomtown exhibit explores Las Vegas’ history

Las Vegas’ past is present at the Springs Preserve’s new Boomtown 1905 exhibit.

Open to the public Saturday, the new themed area transports visitors back in time to the city of Las Vegas’ earliest days as a dusty railroad watering stop.

Although most of Boomtown’s buildings are re-creations, the area includes four structures that have been around since those early days: cottages built for railroad employees and their families from 1909 to 1911.

The quartet of cottages, originally downtown, moved to the Springs Preserve shortly before it opened a decade ago.

But Aaron Micallef, the Springs’ curator of exhibits, was concerned there wasn’t enough of a reason for people to go out there just to see the cottages. “We needed to make more of the experience.”

That “more” became re-creations and representations of other early Las Vegas businesses, from the train depot itself to the Arizona Club, the most famous — and, perhaps, infamous — gambling saloon in town.

OK, so the real Arizona Club was a few blocks away, in Las Vegas’ notorious Block 16 (on First Street between Ogden and Stewart avenues), where saloons and prostitution flourished.

Boomtown 1905 concentrates on more family-friendly activities designed to bring Las Vegas’ early history alive.

At the depot, visitors can send make-believe telegraph messages in Morse code or operate a steam train whistle. (There’s also a vintage newsstand featuring copies of, among other publications, the Las Vegas Age, which began publication in the Boomtown year of 1905.)

Springs patrons can ride the preserve’s trackless train to the depot — or walk a quarter-mile to it along the Exploration Loop Trail to Boomtown’s main street.

The Mission Revival-style architecture of the Lincoln Hotel, where travelers could find “good, clean beds” starting at 25 cents, may look familiar; the real version, now the Victory Hotel, still stands on Main Street. (Inside the Lincoln, visitors can sign the guest book and check out a simply furnished room.)

“Flickers” from the early 1900s — featuring such silent-screen attractions as Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford and Helen Holmes, star of the “Hazards of Helen” cliffhanger serial, which filmed in Las Vegas in 1910 — “unspool” at the Majestic Theater. Boomtown 1905 re-creates the Majestic in its summer “Airdome” incarnation, when audiences watched outdoors because the theater’s interior was too stifling to endure.

A mercantile store, stocked with a wide variety of goods, provides Springs Preserve visitors with a variety of activities: trying on period fashions, weighing goods (flour, for example, is 10 cents a pound) and ringing up purchases on an old-fashioned, gilded cash register.

Some antique cans stacked on the shelves are the real deal; others are old cans with new labels.

“That’s the challenge — of making things look brand new,” notes assistant curator Emmi Saunders, while working on a mercantile exhibit before Boomtown 1905’s debut.

As for what’s in the Arizona Club’s cork-topped whiskey bottles, Micallef reveals his secret recipe: mineral oil and the same kind of food-safe dye used to give hard candy its rainbow colors.

Genuine clay gambling chips are on display behind the Arizona Club’s bar (where visitors can buy water and train-transfer tokens), but present-day roulette players will use new vinyl chips.

And speaking of money, Boomtown 1905’s First State Bank includes an assay scale where wannabe miners may weigh precious metals, then sign and seal a completed assay slip. (Trade the slip in at the preserve’s Nature Exchange for some genuine iron pyrite — better known as “fool’s gold.”)

Boomtown visitors also can explore one of the four authentic railroad cottages, which rented back in the day for $18 a month. Period furnishings, from wind-up phonograph to vintage gas stove, help bring the past to life.

“In my mind, the idea of false-front architecture” inspired Boomtown 1905’s look, Micallef explains, recalling the town’s origins, when visitors entered what looked like a building, only to discover “there’s a tent” rather than a permanent structure. “That’s how Las Vegas started.”

With the exception of the general-style general store, “we tried to base” Boomtown’s other structures “on specific locations,” according to Micallef.

Throughout, interpretive signs, window displays and other artifacts put the Boomtown exhibit into perspective. (For example, the bank walls feature portraits of Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson, the three presidents in office during the area’s 1905-1920 time frame.)

The expansion adds about 4,700 square feet of new exhibit space to the Springs Preserve. Relocating the four railroad cottages and designing, developing and building the new exhibits cost about $6.5 million. (The project was funded primarily through proceeds from a Southern Nevada Public Lands Management Act grant for parks, trails and natural areas, sponsored by the city of Las Vegas.)

Overall, it’s another way to tell the story of water in Las Vegas, explains Micallef. (Another water-themed exhibit is scheduled to open at the Springs Preserve in June.) After all, “water lured the railroad here — and the railroad coming here” put the boomtown of Las Vegas on the map.

Read more from Carol Cling at reviewjournalcom. Contact her at ccling@reviewjournal.com and follow @CarolSCling on Twitter.