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Vegas Retold

The history of Northern Club

Opened 1920 Historic property · Closure date unknown

La Bayou’s neon sign and narrow entrance in 2011, illustrating the later Fremont Street site associated with Northern Club rather than the earlier club itself.
Later site context: La Bayou at the associated Fremont Street address on February 18, 2011. This is not a photograph of Northern Club or its original building.

time anchor / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0

Image source· License

Original Commons file retained without editorial alteration. Responsive overview and index presentation may crop the image; original motion softness is retained.

Northern Club began as Mayme Stocker’s card room at 15 East Fremont Street in 1920. The Stocker family had settled in Las Vegas in 1911 after following railroad work west. Their business connected the early railroad town to the licensed gambling industry that emerged in the following decade.

A railroad family’s business

Mayme’s position as owner was shaped by the railway’s rules. Railroad employees could not own saloons or gambling clubs, so her husband Oscar’s name could not appear on the licence. Their son Harold became the club’s chief operator after losing railroad work. Northern Club was a family enterprise, with Mayme holding a role that her husband’s employment prevented him from taking.

Mayme Stocker and the 1931 licence

In 1931, after Nevada legalized commercial gambling, Stocker and partner Joe H. Morgan secured a gaming licence for Northern Club. Clark County recognizes Stocker as the first woman to receive a casino gaming licence that year. The surviving 1931 licence is among the Stocker Family Papers preserved at UNLV.

Closure and a continuing hotel

Northern Club’s later history has gaps. UNLV’s archival guide says the Depression forced the family’s club to close, while they continued operating the hotel and leased the ground floor. It does not supply a closing year. The end of that family operation, later uses of the premises and the survival of the hotel should not be treated as the same event.

Later casinos at the address

Monte Carlo Club opened at 15 Fremont in 1945. The much later Coin Castle, followed by La Bayou, brought different names and businesses to the address. La Bayou closed in 2016, and Golden Gate incorporated its land into a casino expansion completed in 2017.

What the site can tell us

This sequence explains why Northern Club matters beyond a licensing milestone: it reveals how a small family business became one chapter in a repeatedly reused Downtown site. Northern Club is a historic property; neither its exact closing date nor a surveyed original footprint is established here. The later La Bayou photograph shows the address in 2011, not Northern Club’s building or appearance in the 1920s.

  1. UNLV: Stocker Family Papers

  2. David Schwartz: Mayme Stocker and women in gaming

  3. Clark County: Mayme Stocker

  4. UNLV: Monte Carlo Club records

  5. Pam Goertler: Coin Castle and La Bayou

  6. KNPR: La Bayou closure, June 2016

  7. Golden Gate: expansion onto former La Bayou land

  8. Wikimedia Commons: explicitly later La Bayou site context

What remains uncertain

  • 1920 dates the original card room; 1931 dates its licence under the new legal framework. No exact opening day is established.
  • The archival guide describes a Depression-era closure of the Stocker operation without a year. Imported 1942 and other retrospective closing dates are not adopted as verified facts. Historic status is explicit while the closure date remains unknown.
  • UNLV identifies 15 East Fremont Street, while some historical photograph captions use 13 Fremont. The site marker is approximate, with original walls and footprint unresolved. No identical-building or uninterrupted-business continuity is asserted.
  • No rights-cleared original Northern Club photograph has been established. The dated La Bayou photograph is explicitly later site context; the overview illustration is based on a user-supplied Fremont Street postcard credited “Photo by Ullom”, whose exact date and rights are unverified.

This site through time

Shared or overlapping site with La Bayou

Northern Club and the later Coin Castle/La Bayou casino are associated with the historic 15 Fremont Street address. They operated in different periods, with Monte Carlo Club and other uses between them. This is a historical site association, not a claim that the businesses operated together, that La Bayou was a direct rename of Northern Club, or that the same building survived throughout. La Bayou closed in 2016; its site became part of Golden Gate’s 2017 expansion.

Historical source — UNLV Stocker Family Papers biographical note, pages 3–4: Northern Club at 15 E Fremont and undated Depression closure. NGCB March 3, 2015 locations report, PDF index 354: La Bayou at 15 E Fremont. UNLV Monte Carlo records describe the intervening 1945 club. The later Golden Gate expansion is independently documented by its September 5, 2017 release.

  • Some historical captions use 13 Fremont rather than 15. The association identifies the general historic address, not identical surveyed footprints.
  • Exact Northern Club closure and the intervening building sequence remain unresolved. No direct rename, continuous casino operation or simultaneous occupation is asserted.
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