Boulder City and its airport were planned in 1931 to house the 21,000 workers who poured Hoover Dam
A Pirep featured story · KBVU Boulder City Municipal, Boulder City, NV
In 1931 the federal Bureau of Reclamation had a problem. The dam it had authorized for Black Canyon on the Colorado River — the future Hoover Dam — was going to require an industrial workforce on a scale the empty Mojave Desert had never seen. Twenty-one thousand men. They would need somewhere to live, somewhere their families could go to school, somewhere a doctor could see them. Las Vegas was the closest town. It was 26 miles away, had a population of 5,000, and was famous for gambling and prostitution. The Bureau decided the dam workers would not be living in Las Vegas.
The Bureau built its own town. Boulder City was laid out from scratch in 1931 by Saco Rienk DeBoer, a Dutch-born planner who had designed sections of Denver. The street grid radiated from a central park with the federal administration building at the top. Every house was government-owned. Alcohol was banned. So was gambling. So was prostitution. So was unionization. Workers and their families lived in Boulder City; they worked the dam; they were paid in scrip redeemable at the federal commissary. The town was a 1930s company town in every meaningful sense, with the federal government as the company.
The airport came with the town. A 5,103-foot runway was graded southwest of the residential blocks in 1933, primarily to fly federal inspectors and contractors in from Washington. After the dam was completed in 1936 the workforce dispersed but the airport stayed open. Las Vegas grew into the city it is now. Boulder City stayed small — population about 15,000 today, still federally chartered, still no gambling within city limits.
What KBVU became is the launch point for the Grand Canyon. Helicopters, fixed-wing tour aircraft, and air taxis run thousands of flights a year to Grand Canyon West, to Hoover Dam overflights, to Lake Mead. About 55% of the airport's 100,000+ operations are commercial air-taxi traffic. The 32 based helicopters make Boulder City one of the most helicopter-dense GA fields in the country. The second runway, 3,852 feet, is dedicated almost entirely to the rotorcraft traffic.
Land at KBVU and you're on a runway that was built to inspect the dam and turned into the back door to one of the great natural wonders of the western United States. The administration building on the central park is still there. So is the rule against alcohol — partially. Boulder City sells beer now but not liquor by the drink. Some of the company-town logic survives.