History
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Desert Companion
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He adds, “We did our home in a Cape Cod style, fully bricked across the front.” Spanier says it’s “unfair and unacceptable” not to let his fellow residents do the same. And what would historic status do to his homeimprovement costs? For instance, he says his home needs new, double-paned windows; the original ones are “horrible.” He can switch to double-paned ones for $4,200, whereas he says recreating the originals — something he assumes would be mandated by design standards — would cost $18,000. (Bob Bellis, a Historic Preservation Commission member who lives in the nearby John S. Park Neighborhood Historic District and just replaced his own windows within his neighborhood’s design guidelines, says, “It’s not more expensive at all. That’s just misinformation.”) Misinformed or not, this sort of latedeveloping but vociferous opposition caught both Westleigh advocates and the Historic Preservation Commission off guard. “We didn’t build up a great counterattack,” says Westleigh Neighborhood Association President Tiffany Hesser. “I don’t know if it’s our place to go and tell people they should love this, whereas the people opposing this were very aggressive.” Precarious position “Veterans! You, too … can live in Westleigh, Las Vegas’ finest residential area!” Thus proclaimed an ad in the Nov. 16, 1952 edition of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Westleigh sprang from a
single model home at 3301 W. Charleston Blvd., then the far western fringe of Las Vegas. A series of growth spurts, mainly in 1953 and 1954, eventually swelled it to 288 residences, stretching north from Oakey Boulevard and east to Cashman Drive, bounded on the west by an alley that would later become Valley View Boulevard. Westleigh is inconspicuous — by design, says Diana J. Painter, the Spokane, Wash.-based preservationist commissioned to study whether Westleigh qualified for historic-district status. It did, just barely. Painter’s report described the area as “a transition between the Minimal Traditional style of the 1940s and the Ranch style of the 1950s and 1960s.” “It’s a good, intact example of a postwar neighborhood. It has an unusual, creative layout of the actual houses,” Painter says. One of Westleigh’s idiosyncratic features is that, at intersections, the houses are angled slightly away from the street, so they face each other instead. Limited access from nearby arterial streets reflects a concern with pedestrian safety prevalent in the ’50s. Wide, functional alleys allow trash to be discreetly collected in back, and the modest, single-story homes are notable for their incorporation of crawl spaces and hardwood flooring — features soon extirpated from Las Vegas home design. All the Charleston-facing houses have long since become commercial properties. It’s one reason that preservation commission member Mary Hausch
Neighborhood photo courtesy of the Las Vegas News Bureau
In the 1950s, Westleigh sat at the western edge of Las Vegas.