The Last Frontier Hotel is best known as the second resort built on the fledgling Las Vegas Strip, located along historic Highway 91. Built several miles south of downtown Las Vegas, the Last Frontier was completed in 1942, a year after the debut of its neighbor, the El Rancho Vegas.

The off-Strip Landmark Hotel began as an unfinished attraction for a shopping center and became the last of six casinos owned by billionaire Howard Hughes. It would struggle to stay in business for decades until it was closed in 1990 and destroyed in 1995.

The great casino boom on the Strip that had begun in late 1946 with the Flamingo Hotel had come virtually to a halt after Caesars Palace debuted in 1966. Hotel projects that emerged in the 1970s were noticeably more middle class and less glamorous and stylish architecturally than Caesars and other iconic Strip hotels.

John Kell (J. Kell) Houssels, Sr. (1895-1979) turned a small card parlor on Fremont Street in downtown Las Vegas into a gambling club, and over the next four decades he became one of the most respected operators of casinos in Southern Nevada, including the El Cortez, Showboat, and Tropicana.