The Meadows Club: an early Las Vegas destination resort

A destination beyond Fremont Street

The club stood outside the original city limits near the early Boulder Highway, east or southeast of the Fremont Street and Charleston Boulevard convergence. That location placed it along a growing travel corridor rather than among the established downtown gambling rooms.

Dam construction and regional road travel created an audience of workers, visitors, and motorists. A property with space for entertainment and accommodation could appeal to people who wanted more than a short stop at a bar. Accounts also describe a landing strip, although its dimensions and operating dates are not firmly established.

The Meadows is sometimes given a sweeping first-resort title. Its historical value does not depend on winning that contest. It is a well-documented example of Las Vegas experimenting with an integrated destination in the first weeks of the new legal gambling era.

Which Cornero brothers opened it?

Frank and Louis Cornero are the opening operators identified in Patrick Gaffey’s detailed local-history reconstruction. Their brother Anthony, better known as Tony Cornero, later became a much more famous gambling figure, and popular accounts frequently assign the Meadows to him.

Tony’s precise financial or operating role remains disputed. The distinction matters because fame can pull the work of less familiar relatives into a better-known person’s biography. The evidence supports a Cornero-family connection while giving Frank and Louis the clearest direct role in the opening.

The grand opening advertised a formal setting and elaborate entertainment. Guests and staff were reportedly expected to dress for the occasion. From the beginning, the club was selling an atmosphere as well as access to gambling.

A formal interior in the desert

Paul Warner is credited with designing the Meadows, and L. V. King with its decoration. Period descriptions used Spanish, Mission, and modified Moorish language for the design. These terms conveyed an intended sense of style and escape to visitors arriving from the highway.

The flooring illustrates why specific details matter. The main gaming room had tile, while the adjoining Red Room was carpeted. Describing the entire casino as carpeted loses the distinction between its spaces. Surviving opening-era photographs provide a better guide to the room than comparisons with later resorts.

The wider property included hotel accommodation, a restaurant or dinner club, and performance space. Accounts vary on the number of hotel rooms, so a single exact capacity is not asserted here. The full opening gaming inventory is also uncertain; a commonly repeated table-and-slot count has not been securely tied to a primary operating record.

Dinner, a band, and the Meadows Revue

The evening program brought together dining, live music, and revue entertainment. The Meadow Larks band and Meadows Revue appear in historical accounts, while a photograph associated with the hotel fire identifies Will Cowan as the revue’s director.

A later history of Las Vegas casino bands reports that the Gumm Sisters performed at the Meadows, including the young Judy Garland. An entertainment-history account supplies a July 10–17, 1931, engagement window. That remains an attributed retrospective account rather than a directly inspected contemporary advertisement.

The entertainment program is important even without the famous name. A visitor could travel out from town, have dinner, watch a show, and gamble during the same outing. The Meadows was already assembling several elements of the later Las Vegas evening.

Leases, failed revivals, and a radio station

The initial resort did not remain a stable success. Gaffey’s history describes Frank and Louis leasing the club to three employees in February 1932 for $5,000 a year before returning to Los Angeles. In 1935, Dave and Sam Stearns and Larry Potter became associated with another operating phase and the Meadows Cocoanut Grove name.

The establishment had closed under later operators by 1938. Frank attempted a weekend nightclub revival, but it failed. In 1940, KENO rented the building for radio studios, later moving to the El Rancho Vegas in 1941.

That sequence changes the meaning of the usual 1931–1942 date range. The building survived through those years, but it was not one continuously operating casino resort. Its uses and operators changed as the original business model weakened.

Wartime pressure and the final fire

After Frank Cornero’s death in July 1941, Louis sold the property to Nate Mack and R. J. Kaltenborn. They leased it to Edward Clippinger, who reopened it as a brothel. As Las Vegas moved against the older Block 16 vice district, the Meadows briefly benefited from a local exception.

That phase lasted only a short time. Army concerns about prostitution and disease near military installations added pressure to local enforcement, and Sheriff Gene Ward closed the property in July 1942. The story belongs to wartime regulation and a changed use of the premises, not simply to the closing of the 1931 casino.

A fire in February 1943 destroyed the remaining building. Photographs and advertising now preserve the resort’s physical character. Collector catalogs also retain the Meadows name, but the evidence used here does not establish a complete chip issue or denomination list.

The Meadows left a larger lesson than its short life might suggest: Las Vegas was already learning how to combine travel, gambling, food, and entertainment into one destination, while also discovering how vulnerable such a business could be to ownership changes, law, and the surrounding economy.