Tattered sign all that remains of Moulin Rouge in Las Vegas

The Las Vegas Strip remained segregated until 1960, when protestors staged a sit-down at the shuttered Moulin Rouge. Today only a tattered sign remains at the site of the first integrated hotel and casino in the city.
It's historic, but does it have a place in 2009?
Plans for reviving the resort have been redrawn at least four times in the past five years, but rubble and trash are what mostly remain. After a fire five years ago, the most visible reminder of the casino is the cursive sign atop a propped-up wall on the site.
The Moulin Rouge was the first business in Las Vegas where blacks and whites could party together. It is the only Nevada listing on the National Recent Register of Historic Places linked to the history of race relations in the valley.
Yet recent events raise the question, yet again, of the Moulin Rouge's place in today's Las Vegas:
Since late September city inspectors began citing the current owner, Moulin Rouge Properties LLC, for allowing much of the 15-acre site to deteriorate, creating unsafe conditions;
On Feb. 5 the owner filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, pointing to $39.5 million in debt.
The owner also recently promised the city it would move the sign to the lot where the yet-to-be-built Neon Museum stores signs for future display.
Saving the Moulin Rouge sign could be an educational tool, a chance to explain to the valley's millions how the Strip remained segregated until 1960, when casino owners and others agreed to end the practice. That sit-down happened at the Moulin Rouge, by then shuttered.
Katherine Duncan invested more than a decade to keeping the memory of the place alive. She had called the property "one of the most significant sites in American civil rights history."
"If you move the sign, you take away the symbol from the site," she says.
It gives her hope that the symbol may someday be used to "explain to the community: Why did we have to have a Moulin Rouge in the first place?"
Removing the sign also could remove the site's historical considerations from the hands of the property owners, she maintains.
Preservation of the sign gets plenty of interest. A Moulin Rouge spokesman, in his only comments for this story, said the owners want the sign back whenever the site finally gets rebuilt.
The Moulin Rouge, the first integrated hotel and casino in Las Vegas, lasted six months before closing down in 1955. Five years later it was the site of an accord to desegregate the Strip.
Duncan remembers answering the phone at 1:30 in the morning on May 29, 2003; the voice on the other end told her that the remains of the Moulin Rouge were ablaze. As property manager for the company that owned the former casino at the time, Duncan rushed over to the site and watched firefighters beat back flames curling over the elaborate script of the Moulin Rouge marquee.

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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