Photo Credit : Las Vegas Sun
By Jim Barrows
Civilization has closed in on Formyle. A thousand-unit apartment complex has been built just across the (usually) dry wash, scant yards away from what was once the most notorious brothel in Nevada: Roxie’s.
Spell it any way you wish – Formyle or Four Mile. It was four miles beyond the city limits, just off the old Boulder Highway. Roxie’s was there during construction of Hoover Dam. Roxie’s was made notorious by the Las Vegas SUN, Publisher Hank Greenspun’s newspaper; and in the 1963 book, “The Green Felt Jungle” by Hank’s reporter Ed Reid and co-writer Ovid Demaris
Roxie’s: What few cab drivers there were back in the 1950s called a meeting to arrange a proper allocation of the money they’d get for repeat Roxie’s customers. The meeting began with” “Dear fellow pimps…..”
The shady ladies have been gone since shortly after the feds raided the place in ’54. The “cribs,” where three dozen girls entertained, are in ruins.
Roxie’s cost the county sheriff his job, shook up the county commission, and embroiled a couple of the state’s highest and mightiest officials.
But back to the beginning:
Property records show that the Formyle property was owned in the 1920s by Anette Moso; in the ‘30s, by Hans Lee; in the ‘40s, by W.W. McConn. In the early 1930s, when Hoover Dam construction was near its peak, black laborers at the dam settled at Formyle, right next to where Flamingo Wash crosses Boulder Highway. They built a church in their little settlement, and an entertainment center (of sorts).
In June 1930, as more blacks began arriving to work on the dam, a mysterious fire destroyed the roadhouse at Formyle. Arson was suspected. Formyle was “a secretive operation. The local press seldom reported on it.”
The Las Vegas Age newspaper reported a liquor raid by federal agents at Forymyle in November 1931, at the height of Prohibition. Six months later, the county district attorney announced he would clean up “the hell hole in the Four Mile area.”
His attention was called to Formyle because a 15-year-old girl did “specialty dances” there. The Las Vegas Age noted that two taxi-dancers were paid seven cents a dance at Formyle; that bar girls were paid 25 cents for their bar checks. (They were paid for drinking colored water.) A 19-year-old marathon dance entrant was run out of town, the Age noted. A black girl, she had dared ply her trade in downtown Las Vegas’ Block 16.
At the depths of the nation’s Depression (and just after the repeal of Prohibition, allowing liquor to again be served legally), the Age detailed a survey that showed 125 unlicensed girls were working the Boulder Highway joints, from the Las Vegas city limits to Boulder City.
The pollster who compiled the survey was not identified, but five days later County Sheriff Joe Keate emphatically denied its results. Keate said only ten girls were working along Boulder Highway – and they were selling liquor.
The Age noted that Formyle was “most popular in the 1930s and 1940s, with drink, women and social get-togethers of the type.” The town’s only newspaper chronicled from Formyle: “war on undesirables (1932); fights, shootings, liquor violations, vice warnings; a warning to blacks (1934); more raids.
Charles Barbee bought the 3½ acres that would become Roxie’s brothel in 1937, when the dam had been completed. He paid $750 for it. Its value would increase considerably in the next two decades – the war years, the post-war economic n\boom and the birth of the Las Vegas Strip. Today the land, the World War II barracks and dilapidated one-story building where the girls entertained is on the tax rolls as worth $115,000 or so. Not bad, for a big chunk of land a couple hundred yards north of the thriving Boulder Station Hotel & Casino.
Formyle certainly provided entertained for the men who built the magnesium plant for the war, just down the road next to (but not part of) the booming city of Henderson. Formyle also provided amusement for the hundreds of soldiers who began arriving for training at the bombing and gunnery school northeast of Las Vegas, where Nellis Air Force Base is today.
So much amusement that the federal government moved to shut down Formyle in March 1942 because of the rising rate of “social diseases” among gunnery school enlistees. County lawmen decided to raid it two months after that federal edict. Nothing much happened as a result. The Age editorialized against Formyle’s operation in January 1946, near the war’s end. Formyle was shut down again… and again … and again — January ’47, March ’47, June ’47….
Roxie Stovall knew how to grease the political wheels. She ran the place from November 1945 (when Charles Barbee leased it to her as a brothel for $400 a month) for an uninterrupted nine years. Roxie installed a kitchen, plumbing, a bar, generators, a well pump and a concrete safe.
Around 1950 or ’51, due to the press of business, she added ten 12-by-12 rooms for her 35 working girls. There were 20 other employees, including ten bodyguards and one chef. A modest day’s income for Roxie was $3,200. Champagne cost revelers $9 a bottle. The girls paid $150 a month to rent their rooms.
In 1954, Roxie “had some trouble with the law,” according to an insurance appraiser’s report written a few years later, and she leased the property to Pearl Burke for $35,000. The “trouble” was another federal raid, with resulting convictions of the proprietors for Mann Act violations (intertstate transportation in aid of prostitution).
Publisher Greenspun’s Las Vegas SUN took a giant swipe at the county sheriff in his next edition asnd bannered: “Roxie’s Raided.” The sheriff, prodded into action, decided on a raid of his own. When his deputies arrived at Roxie’s, SUN reporter Ed Reid had advance word and arrived with bundles of “Roxie’s Raided” copies. The working girls used them to cover their faces as Reid photographed the proceedings.
Then Greenspun wrote: “After a brief stakeout of ten years, the sheriff’s office amassed sufficient evidence to suspect that Roxie’s was not on the list of the Automobile Association of America as one of the approved motels.”
Voters kicked out the sheriff in the election six months later. Pearl Burke continued the trade at Formyle until new county commissioners then took office. It was operated as a men’s rooming house for another 18 months, when it was nearly destroyed by fire.
The two-story World War II barracks on the property is still there, surrounded by cottonwood trees, overgrowth and random vehicles (some in running condition). It sprouts a TV antenna on its roof. It is a private residence.
A few yards beyond it is what remains of an attempt to resurrect a church that served the neighboring black community. A few yards to the south, across the usually dry Flamingo Wash, is the spanking new 1,000-unit apartment complex. Across Boulder Highway at Formyle Bar, the proprietor serves inquisitive customers but has little to say about the history of Formyle.
Photo Credit : Jim Barrows
