#mobmuseum

Fremont street & the mob museum!

Fremont street is busy already. For those who don’t know freemont street is  Fremont Street is the original home of the strip. The light show/screen celling is pretty neat, but a DJ booth makes it a little loud for me so I head to the Mob museum

One overall thing I notice is the museum is very fact based. A few exhibits within it try to frame things in the context of a story, or specific aspect of mob-life. But overall its a little dry for such a story-rich subject.

Maybe they’re trying to counter all the narratives which are available elsewhere?

But why come to the mob museum if not for the draw of mob stories?

It’s also got a heavy-handed approach to making sure I as the viewer understand the mob is bad/bad guys. Feels like the whole last floor is just emphasizing that these are criminals. 

In more specific highlights:

It’s interesting to see the map of mob activity. The coasts and Chicago weren’t a surprise. But I just never thought of the mob as being in Denver CO.

It was also in Dallas, albeit run largely out of New Orleans.

They have THE st. valentine’s day massacre wall. Literally. When the building was torn down, the bricks from the wall were acquired by George Patey and moved to his nightclub in Vancouver. They were numbered so their position could be preserved. The Mob museum later bought the bricks from Patey’s family and reassembled it.

There’s a collection of old cheat-tricks used in casinos, such as tying a string to a coin so it could be retrieved, or altered dice. 

Likewise there’s a look at how casinos would disposed of old chips by dumping them in Lake Mead, adding them to the foundation of new casinos for luck or casting them in cement so they couldn’t be re-used.

There’s also a mobster’s girlfriend who’s long legs made her the original ‘flamingo’.