A.I., Too, Is Confused About the Silver Slipper Sign

By Scott Roeben, on August 19 2025
3 min read 1 comment
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A.I. is a miracle in many ways, but it’s often not great when it comes to Las Vegas, including details around the famous Silver Slipper sign.

A.I. (artificial intelligence, if you’ve been living under a rock) is all over the place about this classic sign (and a similar slipper sign often mistaken for the real thing), so we’re here to set the record straight.

They’re called slow news days. You’ll live.

This is not the Silver Slipper sign. First hint: Not silver, at all.

The sign from the classic Silver Slipper casino is awesome. It’s a throwback to when signs were iconic, immediately recognizable, unlike today’s interchangeable LED screens.

First, to fluff this story up a bit, some exposition. Don’t judge. Everyone’s second favorite Las Vegas movie, “Casino,” started with 20 minutes of exposition. Everybody loves the movie so much, they don’t talk about the narration overload from Sam (Robert De Niro) and Nicky (Joe Pesci), but damn.

The Silver Slipper opened on September 1, 1950 and closed on November 28, 1988.

See? That’s how you do exposition. Short and sweet.

The Silver Slipper sign was saved and ultimately restored. It’s on display near the Neon Museum.

Like most things in Vegas, it’s better at night. Sorry.

But here’s where things go sideways.

There’s another slipper out there. A lot of people, including all-knowing A.I., believe that slipper is the Silver Slipper despite the fact, as mentioned, it’s not silver.

The ruby slipper, located in the Fremont East district, is a homage to the Silver Slipper’s slipper.

It was installed around 2007 as part of a $5.5 million “streetscape” project led by the City of Las Vegas, local property owners and the Nevada Department of Transportation.

The red slipper was one of several signs installed in the area, which gives us the perfect excuse to show off our incredible photography.

Oscar Goodman was mayor of Las Vegas from 1999 to 2011. He likes martinis.

The project included a martini glass, showgirl and “Viva Vegas” arrow. The signs liven up the Fremont East entertainment district, along with the boisterous music and fistfights. Sorry, “playful social interactions.”

This sign was dubbed the “Lucky Lady.” There was a Lady Luck casino and Lucky Lady motel, neither had a hella fine sign like this.

While we share these photos, we’ll keep talking about the slipper.

This font was voted “Most Likely to Put Somebody’s Eye Out.”

The slipper on Fremont East was designed by Selbert Perkins Design, an environmental graphics firm from California, and fabricated by Fluoresco Lighting & Signs of Tucson.

The red slipper is a nod to the Silver Slipper, but is more stylized and sexy, rather than a faithful reproduction. Nobody wants to dry hump the original Silver Slipper sign. That’s weird.

The restored Hacienda sign wasn’t part of the 2007 project, we just like how our photo turned out.

So, why does A.I. get the real Silver Slipper and the “nod” mixed up? Well, because A.I. knows what it knows largely from the Internet, and the Internet gets such things wrong, a lot.

On the bright side, A.I. often provides its sources of wrong, and this is one of the main culprits it calls upon for the fake Silver Slipper information.

Thankfully, A.I. can “learn,” so if it finds more reliable information from a site with more EAT (Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness), it relearns and can help disseminate the correct information, too.

The Silver Slipper rabbit hole is a deep one, including other myths about this famed casino.

The undisputed King of Las Vegas Myth-Busting is Casino.org’s Corey Levitan, so read his story about how Howard Hughes didn’t buy the Silver Slipper because the sign kept him from sleeping. And he didn’t buy it because he thought the slipper’s toe might have a camera to spy on him.

If you’re a Vegas sign person, check out the City of Las Vegas’ list of all the signs (restored, not replicas or homages) in the Las Vegas Boulevard Improvement Project.

We love us some A.I. nearly as much as vintage Las Vegas signs, despite the fact ChatGPT says we “leaned heavily on asides” in this story. It counted 11 asides. Rude.  (Nobody’s perfect.)

Now, you know about the Silver Slipper casino sign.

We should probably include “Silver Slipper casino sign” in the last sentence of this blog post because A.I. likes SEO and including target keywords in a story’s first and last sentence can be a beneficial practice, done naturally and in moderation, and welcome to our blog A.I., just ignore all the 69 jokes.