The best little non-gambling town in Nevada

The Boulder Dam Hotel, built in 1933, has been restored and reopened as a bed-and-breakfast.

By David Colker

April 4, 2004 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

Welcome to the Village of the Dam.

Boulder City, which bills itself as the country’s first planned community, was created for workers who built one of the most spectacular public works projects in the nation’s history: Hoover Dam.

The town was supposed to disband largely when the dam was completed in 1935, but it has lived on as a gateway to the dam (seven miles away) and Lake Mead National Recreation Area (five miles).

It’s especially pleasant for visitors now that the Boulder Dam Hotel has been restored and reopened as a bed-and-breakfast. The hotel opened in 1933 for tourists, including celebrities who came to see the huge construction site and, in some cases, to take advantage of Nevada’s relaxed divorce laws.

Boulder City — the only municipality in Nevada that does not permit gambling — does not, at first, seem like much of a tourist attraction. It lacks nightlife and elegant dining, and there’s little in the way of interesting shopping. The town, population about 15,000, is not in the business of being quaint or cute.

All of which makes it an offbeat place to stay when you are sightseeing and visiting recreational venues nearby or wanting to get away from the casino atmosphere of Las Vegas, 25 miles away.

There is a casino-restaurant-movie complex, the Hacienda, just a few miles outside city limits on U.S. 93. When my friend Charlie and I drove past, its flashing sign out front advertised slot machines, cheap steak dinners and “The Passion of the Christ.”

Small-town pace
Boulder CITY was more our speed. We got there last month on a Friday afternoon, which was lucky because Chiarelli’s Deli & Market, across from the hotel, closes at 6 p.m. weekdays and isn’t open on weekends.

Chiarelli’s had two great things going for it. The first was the food. We were there just for a snack after the drive (about 275 miles from Los Angeles), so we shared an order of cold, blackened salmon. It was wonderfully flavorful, moist and slightly spicy, and didn’t have that rubberized crust found all too often on blackened fish. The second was the proprietor, Rich Assalone, a warm and funny guy who gave us a quick rundown of the town.

“Three streets, two traffic lights, 10 people,” he said. “You came to the right place if you want quiet.”

His wife, Judy, makes the specials, and the shop bears her family name. “Take a look at my last name,” he said, “and that will tell you why we used hers.”

A few steps outside of the deli, two kids on bicycles suddenly came up on the sidewalk and whisked by a couple of feet away. One of the kids quickly turned to us — to apologize, sincerely.

We weren’t in Los Angeles anymore.

If we needed further proof, there was the “Police Blotter” column in the weekly Boulder City News. The most serious infraction that week was “in reference to a juvenile running into a building with a slingshot. Officer Wood locates the local juvenile and confiscates the slingshot.” The people of Boulder City could again rest easy.

The two-story Boulder Dam Hotel, like most of the early buildings in the town, was constructed in a hurry. The groundbreaking was Sept. 1, 1933, and it opened Dec. 15 the same year.

It doesn’t look hastily built, but with its Colonial style, it does look out of place. The lobby, paneled in caramel-colored southern gumwood, is the most pleasant spot in the hotel. The rooms, all upstairs, are small but tidy, clean and comfortable.

All the rooms have only one bed — $89 for a double, $99 for queen-size. That price might be a tad stiff given the locale and amenities, and you can get a better bargain at other motels in the area, but the Boulder Dam Hotel is steeped in history.

After the hotel’s heyday in the 1930s and 1940s it declined, and by the 1980s it had become a flophouse. The town and local organizations bought the property in 1993 and spent $2 million and eight years restoring it.

The price of the room includes breakfast in the restaurant and admission to the Boulder City/Hoover Dam Museum, also in the hotel.

Some of the exhibits were hokey. Volunteers told us proudly that the museum was “interactive,” but that often meant opening little cabinet doors to read text inside.

Through the text, pictures and sound recordings, though, you could get a clear idea of the harsh conditions the dam’s early workers — and their families — endured. The first living quarters near the site were shantytowns and tent compounds. Boulder City, constructed by the same consortium of companies building the dam, was a godsend to these folks, even though its dormitories and un-air-conditioned houses were hardly ideal.

Although we would hear much the same history at Hoover Dam’s overblown visitors center the next day, we were glad to take it all in in this quiet museum.

Also, the Boulder City museum tackled tough topics not covered as deeply on the dam tour, including racism at the construction project and in the town. Black workers could seldom get jobs at the construction site, and when they did, they were not allowed to live in Boulder City.

Engineering marvel
That night we drove to Las Vegas for our big splurge of the trip: dinner at Bouchon, a restaurant at the Venetian hotel overseen by Thomas Keller of French Laundry fame.

Maybe the food and atmosphere didn’t rank with that Napa Valley restaurant, but the bill for dinner was less than half the price. And it was plenty terrific, especially a splendid gnocchi dish atop a ragout of winter vegetables. As I did on my only trip to French Laundry, I ate with almost painful slowness, savoring each bite.

The next day was for the dam. If you haven’t seen it, you have to go. Its magnificence and beauty — not only as an engineering wonder but also as a kind of art installation that makes that Christo’s stuff look like Tastykake wrappers — are unforgettable.

But if you have seen it in years past, before the $100-million Hoover Dam Visitor Center opened in the mid-1990s, you might want to skip it. Visitors no longer get a single guide leading a tour; they go to “stations,” each with a different lecturer. Some were fine, others so forcibly chirpy that I felt I had taken a wrong turn and ended up on the Universal Studios tour.

The new regimen may be better for crowd control and security, but I missed the kind of tour where one could make a connection with a guide and others in a group. Many facts about the dam are now imparted in multimedia exhibits. I got so overloaded by this barrage of audio-visual material — much of it repetitive — that I longed to just open a little cabinet door and read some text.

Charlie and I were glad to get back to Boulder City. We headed for the museum’s gift shop, which we didn’t have a chance to visit the day before. A volunteer seemed genuinely glad to answer questions about the town. She gave us each a walking tour map, marking where the original workers’ homes, nicknamed dingbats, still stood.

We headed to the southern part of town to see them, but it was impossible to find a house that looked remotely like the originals in the pictures. They had been such unprotected little shells that owners over the years had stuccoed, expanded and improved them. We walked to the northwest to see brick houses that had been built, as one woman in town put it, “for the big shots,” the managers of the dam construction.

Along the way we chatted with a variety of people, played with their pets and had an entirely pleasant afternoon.

I can’t pretend that Boulder City is Shangri-La — or even that I’ll ever spend the night there again. But was fun to explore a historically significant town minus the wooden tour guides or Disneyfied exhibits — a place that deserves to be appreciated as more than a footnote to the history of Hoover Dam.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Budget for two

Expenses for this trip:

Lodging

Boulder Dam Hotel,

two nights with tax $211.86

Chiarelli’s Deli & Market $9.62

Dinner

Bouchon $167.26

Hoover Dam tour $20.00
Other meals $141.96
Gas $45.54

Final tab $596.24

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