Laughlin’s Riverside Resort, developed by town’s namesake, celebrates 60th

In the early 1970s, the municipality of Laughlin did not truly exist. It was merely the name of a small station bureau belonging to casino operator Don Laughlin’s Riverside Resort, according to a story in the Las Vegas Review‑Journal. Longtime residents recalled the surrounding area as a place to camp or fish. Today, several hotel‑casinos line the banks of the Colorado River in the remote community about 100 miles southeast of Las Vegas. The property that sparked the area’s development has just reached a major milestone. Riverside Resort marked its 60th anniversary on Aug. 3. A press release noted that the property, still owned by the founder’s family, has expanded dramatically since its opening in 1966. It began as an eight‑room motel with 12 slot machines. Now the Riverside offers 1,350 rooms, more than 1,000 gambling machines, 22 table games, two rooftop pools, a 34‑lane bowling center, a six‑screen movie theater, and numerous bars and restaurants. The Riverside Resort hotel‑casino adjacent to the banks of the Colorado River is seen on Tuesday, Sept. 9, 2025, in Laughlin. (Bizuayehu Tesfaye/Las Vegas Review‑Journal) @bizutesfaye Laughlin, an unincorporated community at the southern tip of Clark County across the river from Arizona, has long provided a low‑cost, no‑frills getaway that draws mostly older visitors who drive in for their trips. Overall, Laughlin receives a fraction of the traffic seen in the rowdier, flashier and vastly larger Las Vegas. Yet, over the past year or so, visitor numbers in Laughlin have held up better than in America’s casino capital. Matt Laughlin, chief operating officer of the Riverside and grandson of its founder, said a key attraction is the river, and 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, previously owned a gambling spot in North Las Vegas called the 101 Club. After selling that property in the mid‑1960s, he sought a new venture. He flew around in his private plane, searching for a casino to acquire on the border of a state that prohibited gambling, and came across a tiny site on the Colorado River far outside Las Vegas, according to the Oral History Research Center at UNLV. “There was just a one‑room building with a bar and restaurant in it,” Laughlin told the research center in 2016. “It was a mess.” He bought the property, and the Riverside, as he named it, 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, with the other four occupied by Laughlin’s family, according to a history posted on the resort’s website. The area had been known as Tri State but was renamed Laughlin after a U.S. Postal Service inspector insisted on a name to deliver mail, the website says. “Despite occasional printed references to a place called Laughlin, Nevada, there is no such town,” according to a Review‑Journal article from 1972, adding that Laughlin was “simply the name of a small station office” at the Riverside casino‑resort. ‘To call this a boomtown is an outrageous understatement’ By 1977, Nevada’s southernmost community was “just a pause in the road” with four casinos, a condo development, a few mobile‑home parks and a power plant, the Review‑Journal reported. At that time — as it remains today — the area’s growth was centered across the river in Bullhead City, Arizona, the paper noted. Laughlin’s tourism industry experienced a big growth spurt in the 1980s as developers erected more hotels along the river and increased gambling revenue. In 1985, the Los Angeles Times reported that Laughlin had 1,600 hotel rooms spread among seven casinos, along with 6,000 employees. Just two years earlier, there had been a total of 450 rooms and upward of 2,000 employees. “To call this a boomtown is an outrageous understatement,” the Times declared. Las Vegas was about to enter a chaotic phase of casino expansion in the 1990s, when hotel owners began imploding older buildings to make room for bigger, flashier properties. Virtually every new casino or related project is planned on or near Las Vegas Boulevard, which is packed with megaresorts that often contain thousands of rooms each. But in Laughlin, construction along the main drag, Casino Drive, essentially halted after the burst of projects in the 1980s, Clark County records show. Matt Laughlin said that, regarding building development in town, “not much has happened since then.” Nevertheless, the Riverside has undergone multiple expansions and upgrades over the years, including in the 1970s, ’80s, ’90s and 2000s, adding hotel towers, the bowling alley and other amenities. ‘The value we strive to provide’ Overall, an estimated 752,000 people visited Laughlin through June of this year, up 5.8 percent from the same six‑month period last year, according to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. By comparison, roughly 19.6 million people visited Las Vegas during the first half of 2026, up just 0.2 percent from the same period the previous year, the tourism bureau reported. This followed an even larger divergence the prior year: In 2025, visitor volume to Las Vegas fell 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, sales and entertainment manager 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 cannot match Las Vegas’ virtually endless array of entertainment options. However, the community offers its own selection of recreation, including headline acts. Last year, its lineup featured country‑music stars Miranda Lambert and Jason Aldean and movie‑star comics Marlon Wayans and Kevin Hart. This October, hip‑hop stars Nelly and Lil Jon are scheduled to perform at the Laughlin Event Center. Plus, a major draw to Laughlin is the Colorado River, where visitors can take boat rides, zip around on jet skis, or simply enjoy the scenery. ‘We’re doing well’ Laughlin Bullhead International Airport sits 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 about 25,000 passengers per month bound for the Riverside. Typically, 90 percent to 95 percent of those passengers receive complimentary flights, he confirmed. Still, Laughlin is known as a drive‑in market, and the recent rise in fuel prices “affects us tremendously,” he said, adding that the resort is sold out nearly every weekend but guests are spending less. As he described it, rising costs continually pressure the Riverside’s bottom line, but revenue has not been a problem. “We’re doing well,” he said.