In 1950, Senator Estes Kefauver’s committee questioned witnesses here about organised crime in the casino industry. The restored courtroom is inside the museum: you are standing in the room where the questions were asked, not a recreated movie set.

The Moulin Rouge opened in 1955 as Las Vegas’s first major racially integrated hotel and casino. Its brief life left a lasting legacy: the property hosted the 1960 agreement that helped end segregation in the city’s hotels. Betty Willis designed its elegant neon lettering.

Boxing champion Joe Louis invested in the Moulin Rouge and worked as a greeter there. His connection to the casino is part of a bigger Vegas story about Black entertainers, business owners and the fight against segregation.

Vegas Vic arrived above the Pioneer Club in 1951. The cowboy became a symbol of downtown’s neon era, surviving long after the original casino closed. Look up from Fremont Street for this familiar face from old Vegas photographs.

Long before it became Westgate, this resort hosted Elvis Presley’s celebrated Las Vegas residency. The bronze Elvis statue offers a present-day stop connected to the singer’s Vegas years, without needing a show ticket.

Caesars Palace is the recognisable hotel at the heart of The Hangover. Its entrance and lobby make an easy film-location stop. The spectacularly trashed suite was created on a soundstage, so there is no real room that exactly matches that scene.

Caesars Palace also features in Rain Man, when the brothers’ road trip reaches Las Vegas. The real hotel provides the setting for their casino success and dancing lesson. Enjoy spotting the resort rather than expecting every filming space to be publicly accessible.

Diamonds Are Forever brought James Bond to Circus Circus in 1971. The casino and midway featured in the film, making the resort a surviving link to the bright, theatrical Vegas of the early 1970s.

Vegas Vickie’s neon cowgirl sign now takes centre stage inside Circa, beside the cocktail lounge named for her. It is a modern resort making room for a piece of downtown’s older visual identity.

Betty Willis designed the famous welcome sign in 1959. Look closely at the seven circles spelling WELCOME: they represent silver dollars. Its starburst and diamond shape turned a roadside greeting into one of the city’s most recognisable landmarks.

Golden Gate began as Hotel Nevada in 1906. According to the hotel’s history, it received Las Vegas’s first telephone in 1907, with the number 1. The modern casino sits on Fremont Street, but its story reaches back to the city’s earliest hotel days.

Modern Las Vegas took shape around the railroad. On 15 May 1905, a land auction sold plots in a new townsite near the station. The railroad linked Los Angeles and Salt Lake City, and the valley’s water helped make this desert stop important. The city incorporated in 1911.

Look up in Bellagio’s lobby to find Dale Chihuly’s Fiori di Como, created in 1998. The glass installation takes its name from the flowers of Como, connecting the resort to its inspiration in Bellagio on Italy’s Lake Como. It is a colourful art stop hiding in plain sight above arriving guests.

The Venetian’s canals turn a shopping and hotel visit into theatre. Gondoliers in striped shirts and straw hats sing as they guide their boats with a traditional rowing oar. The experience borrows the imagery of Venice and places it among Las Vegas’s elaborate themed resorts.

Stardust’s signs captured the optimism of the Space Age. The resort opened in 1958 with lettering designed by Kermit Wayne. A decade later, Paul Miller designed its huge roadside pylon. These were different signs from different moments, showing how a casino could reinvent its identity through light.

The Neon Museum’s visitor centre began life as the lobby of the La Concha Motel on the Strip. Architect Paul Revere Williams designed its sweeping shell forms in 1961. Saved from demolition in 2005 and moved in 2006, the building became a remarkable entrance to a museum devoted to saving Vegas’s visual history. The building is an exhibit before you even reach the signs.

Main Street Station’s Victorian styling hides an unexpected historical object: a section of the Berlin Wall. It is displayed in a men’s restroom, a startling contrast between the casino’s everyday surroundings and an object associated with a divided city. The resort’s wider collection of antiques makes this more than a one-item curiosity; it rewards looking closely at the interiors.

El Cortez opened in 1941, before the modern Strip became the city’s dominant image. In 1945, a group including Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky bought the property. Their ownership was brief, but it gives this surviving downtown casino a direct connection to the names usually associated with the Flamingo story. The history is more complicated than a single gangster inventing Las Vegas.

In 1980, Kevin Hillier found an extraordinary gold nugget in Australia using a metal detector. Weighing approximately 61 pounds, the Hand of Faith eventually became a famous lobby display at Golden Nugget. The casino’s name gives it a wonderfully appropriate home, but this is a real prospecting discovery rather than a prop designed for a themed resort.

When new owners remodelled Atomic Liquors after buying it in 2012, they found a safe beneath the floor. It did not produce a movie-style fortune. Instead, receipts and paperwork preserved the ordinary business of an earlier Vegas: a more intimate sort of treasure. The bar’s own history says the safe remains in its original position under a transparent cover, turning bookkeeping into a small historical exhibit.

On 31 December 1967, Evel Knievel attempted to jump the fountains outside Caesars Palace on a Triumph motorcycle. The landing ended in a severe crash, yet the footage helped turn him into an internationally recognised daredevil. It is a reminder that Vegas’s showmanship was never confined to a stage: even a hotel entrance could become a worldwide spectacle.

Hoover Dam’s story includes an entire community. Boulder City was developed in the early 1930s to house workers and their families during construction. The dam brought jobs during the Great Depression and became part of the infrastructure supporting the region’s growth. Looking beyond the concrete reveals a story of labour, family life and a purpose-built town, rather than simply another sightseeing structure.

A boneyard is traditionally a storage area for things no longer in use. In Las Vegas, the word acquired a much brighter afterlife. YESCO’s collection of retired signs helped preserve pieces of casinos that had disappeared or reinvented themselves. At the Neon Museum, these objects are deliberately arranged and interpreted, turning what might have become scrap into a record of the city’s designers, businesses and changing tastes.

The Silver Slipper casino is gone, but its enormous high-heeled sign survives as part of the Las Vegas Boulevard Scenic Byway project. It is a wonderfully direct piece of roadside design: a shoe recognisable before a driver could read a paragraph of advertising. Seeing it away from its original casino shows how Vegas’s landmarks can outlive the businesses they were built to sell.

Fremont Street Experience opened in 1995, adding a canopy and pedestrian entertainment district to the street associated with old Vegas. It did not erase the historic casino façades; it changed the way visitors moved between them. Today’s immense digital display is part of that continuing reinvention, with the skyline overhead becoming as much a performance space as the stages below.