Joe Downtown: Decades-old safe discovered in Atomic Liquors yields only old receipts

Monday, Feb. 18, 2013 | 2:32 p.m.

New owners of Atomic Liquors on Fremont Street, one of the oldest free-standing taverns in Las Vegas, finally opened a floor safe discovered months ago during remodeling. With local tales of the Atomic’s customers including the likes of the Rat Pack, Barbra Streisand and union honcho Jimmy Hoffa, the owners had fun imagining the safe's contents. Turns out, imagination and reality didn’t meet. The safe was opened Sunday and contained little beyond some 59-year-old receipts for soda and liquor. One receipt dated June 23, 1954, was from Redwood Publishing Company for what appeared to be an Atomic advertisement, which ran ...

Joe Schoenmann doesn’t just cover downtown, he lives and works there. Schoenmann is Greenspun Media Group’s embedded downtown journalist, working from an office in the Emergency Arts building.

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