In the early 1970s, the town of Laughlin didn’t really exist.
It was just the name of a small post office in casino owner Don Laughlin’s Riverside Resort, according to a report back then in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, which noted that old-time residents knew the surrounding area as a place to camp or fish.
Nowadays, several hotel-casinos line the banks of the Colorado River in the remote town some 100 miles southeast of Las Vegas. And the property that led the way just hit a big milestone.
Riverside Resort celebrated its 60th anniversary on Aug. 3. A news release on the event noted that the property, which is still owned by the late developer’s family, has grown immensely since its founding in 1966.
It started as an eight-room motel with 12 slot machines. Today, the Riverside boasts 1,350 rooms, more than 1,000 gambling machines, 22 live table games, two rooftop pools, a 34-lane bowling center, a six-screen movie theater, and several bars and restaurants.
Laughlin, a small, unincorporated town at the southern tip of Clark County across the river from Arizona, has long offered a low-priced, low-frills getaway and drawn a mostly older crowd that largely drives in for their trips.
Overall, it gets a fraction of the business of rowdier, flashier and vastly larger Las Vegas. But over the past year or so, Laughlin’s visitor volume has held up better than in America’s casino capital.
Matt Laughlin, chief operating officer of the Riverside and grandson of its founder, said that a key attraction in town is the river and that visitors are drawn by the slower pace and the prices.
“It’s an affordable destination compared to Las Vegas,” he said.
‘It was a mess’
Don Laughlin, who died in 2023 at age 92, had owned a gambling spot in North Las Vegas called the 101 Club. After he sold the place in the mid-1960s, he went looking for a new venture.
He flew around in his private plane, trying to find a casino to purchase on the border of a state that didn’t allow gambling, and came across a small property along the Colorado River far outside Las Vegas, according to the Oral History Research Center at UNLV.
“There was just a little one-room building with a bar and restaurant in it,” Laughlin told the research center in 2016. “It was a mess.”
Still, Laughlin bought the place, and the Riverside, as he named the property, opened in 1966.
It offered all-you-can-eat chicken dinners for 98 cents; 12 slot machines and two table games; and four available rooms, as the other four were occupied by Laughlin’s family, according to a history of the property on the Riverside’s website.
The area had been known as Tri State but was named Laughlin after a U.S. Postal Service inspector insisted on a name to obtain mail, the website says.
“Despite occasional printed references to a place called Laughlin, Nevada, there is no such town,” according to a report in the Review-Journal in 1972, adding that Laughlin was “simply the name of a little post office” in the Riverside casino-resort.
‘To call this a boom town is an outrageous understatement’
By 1977, Nevada’s southernmost town was “just a pause in the road” with four casinos, a condo development, a few mobile-home parks and a power station, the Review-Journal reported.
At the time — as it is today — the area’s population growth was centered across the river in Bullhead City, Arizona, the paper reported.
Laughlin’s tourism industry had a big growth spurt in the 1980s as developers put up more hotels along the river and raked in more gambling revenue.
In 1985, the Los Angeles Times reported that Laughlin had 1,600 hotel rooms scattered among seven casinos, along with 6,000 employees. Just two years earlier, there were a total of 450 rooms and upwards of 2,000 employees
“To call this a boom town is an outrageous understatement,” the paper declared.
Las Vegas was about to enter a wild new phase of casino development in the 1990s, when hotel owners started imploding old buildings to clear space for bigger, flashier ones. All told, new casinos or other projects are practically always being planned on or near Las Vegas Boulevard, which is packed with megaresorts that often have thousands of rooms apiece.
But in Laughlin, resort construction along the main drag, Casino Drive, all but stopped after the burst of projects in the 1980s, Clark County property records show.
Matt Laughlin said that when it comes to resort development in town, “not much has happened since then.”
Nonetheless, the Riverside has gone through multiple expansions and upgrades over the years, including in the 1970s, ’80s, ’90s and 2000s, adding hotel towers, the bowling alley and other features.
‘The value we strive to provide’
Overall, an estimated 752,000 people visited Laughlin this year through June, up 5.8 percent from the same six-month stretch last year, according to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority.
By comparison, around 19.6 million people visited Las Vegas during the first half of 2026, up just 0.2 percent from the same period last year, the tourism agency reported.
This followed an even bigger spread last year: In 2025, visitor volume to Las Vegas dropped by 7.5 percent from 2024 — while in Laughlin, it rose by 7.3 percent, the LVCVA found.
At the Riverside this year, occupancy is up 2 percent year-to-date, said Diana Fuchs, marketing and entertainment director for the resort.
She attributed this to the “continued appeal of Laughlin and the value we strive to provide our guests.”
Like other tourist destinations, Laughlin can’t match Las Vegas’ all-but endless array of entertainment options. But the town has its own share of recreation, including big-name acts.
Last year, its lineup included country-music stars Miranda Lambert and Jason Aldean and movie-star comics Marlon Wayans and Kevin Hart. And, this October, hip-hop stars Nelly and Lil Jon are scheduled to perform at the Laughlin Event Center.
Plus, a key draw to Laughlin is the Colorado River, where people can take boat rides, zip around on jet skis, or just enjoy the scenery.
‘We’re doing well’
Laughlin Bullhead International Airport is just across the river in Arizona, and the Riverside brings many of its customers to town by air.
Matt Laughlin said the resort charters four to six flights per week on Boeing 737 jets from September to May, estimating around 25,000 passengers per season fly to the Riverside.
Typically, 90 percent to 95 percent of the passengers receive comped flights, he confirmed.
Still, Laughlin is known as a drive-in market, and the sharp rise in gas prices lately “affects us tremendously,” he said, adding that the resort is sold out nearly every weekend but that guests are spending less.
As he described it, rising expenses constantly chip away at the Riverside’s bottom line, but revenue hasn’t been a problem.
“We’re doing well,” he said.
Contact Eli Segall at esegall@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0342.
