Wow Hamburgers Las Vegas History: A Vintage Las Vegas Sign That Shaped Las Vegas Strip History

A Tiny Building, a Giant Sign

On the 1200 block of South Las Vegas Boulevard, far from the neon dazzle of the Strip’s casino dining rooms, a modest roadside restaurant made an enormous statement. In the late 1960s, Wow Hamburgers became one of the most photographed spots in vintage Las Vegas—not for its burgers, but for its colossal, gleefully simple sign that blared “WOW HAMBURGERS” to every motorist passing by.

The story begins earlier, in the late 1950s, when the building itself was constructed as an automobile showroom. Desert Edsel Sales and later Todkill English Ford kept the property in the automotive world before the mid-1960s conversion to a restaurant called Carroll’s. Carroll’s pole sign advertised “65¢ HAMBURGERS,” a straightforward roadside pitch to hungry drivers heading toward the Strip.

From 65¢ to WOW

Sometime in the latter part of the 1960s, someone made a bold decision. The “65¢” panel was replaced with a dramatically oversized “WOW,” transforming an ordinary price announcement into a theatrical exclamation. The result was a sign so audacious and instantly readable that it captured the very essence of Las Vegas Strip history—architecture designed not for leisurely strollers but for people moving at sixty miles an hour.

Little documentation survives about who owned the place, what the full menu looked like, or exactly when Wow Hamburgers opened its doors. What we do have is its immortal appearance in photographs taken during the landmark 1968 Las Vegas research project led by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour.

Learning from Las Vegas, Literally

The team’s photographs of Wow’s towering sign perched above its tiny building became part of the visual research that fed into the 1972 book Learning from Las Vegas. The restaurant perfectly illustrated the roadside commercial landscape they were studying: buildings that communicated instantly, signs that spoke in bold words rather than abstraction, architecture that embraced the loud and the direct. Wow Hamburgers wasn’t trying to impress with design sophistication. It was trying to get you to stop, and it succeeded spectacularly.

A Sign That Lived Many Lives

When Wow Hamburgers eventually closed and the property changed uses, the sign outlived the restaurant itself. In the 1970s, it was repurposed for Sam Krug Chrysler-Plymouth and later World Bazaar. Then, in 1993, the Talk of the Town adult club moved in and the sign read “STRIPPERS.” Each iteration reflected a different era of Las Vegas, but none matched the innocent, burger-loving exclamation of the original.

Legacy on the Boulevard

Today, Wow Hamburgers represents something rare in Las Vegas history: a humble, uncelebrated fast-food stop that earned a permanent place in architectural discourse. It reminds us that the best vintage Las Vegas stories aren’t always about million-dollar casinos or celebrity headliners. Sometimes they’re about a sixty-five-cent burger, a sign that screamed WOW, and a small building that taught an entire profession how to read a city at speed.