🐚 A Black Architect's Curved Lobby, and a Myth Set in Concrete

The swooping visitor center you walk through at the Neon Museum wasn't built for that purpose — it's the relocated 1961 lobby of the old La Concha Motel, and it was designed by Paul Revere Williams, one of the most accomplished architects of his era working in a profession that offered him almost no acceptance because he was Black. Williams built extensively in Las Vegas even as segregation shaped what venues would actually let people of color through the front door, and this shell-shaped Googie-style lobby he designed for a Strip motel now anchors a museum dedicated to the same city's neon history — moved intact, in pieces, to its current site decades after he built it.

Everyone's heard the story that workers who fell into the wet concrete during Hoover Dam's construction are still entombed inside it. It isn't true, and the engineering explains why: crews poured the dam in five-foot blocks and only inches at a time, with men stationed right at the pour watching every bucket go in — there was never a volume of wet concrete large enough for a body to disappear into unnoticed. The dam's construction did kill 96 workers officially, from falls, blasts, and accidents, which is likely where the myth took root and simply refused to let go.