On a warm evening in downtown Las Vegas, a slack-key guitar drifts out of the California Hotel and into the dry desert air. Inside, on the mezzanine at Aloha Specialties, plate lunches go out two at a time. Two scoops of rice, mac salad, a hot pour of brown gravy over loco moco. A grandfather from Waipahu hugs a cousin in from Hilo. This is the room that taught Las Vegas to speak a little Hawaiian.
They call this city Hawaii’s Ninth Island. Not officially. There is no ferry from Honolulu, no postcard view from the Strip. But around the slot machines at The Cal, in the takeout queues at L&L, at every backyard luau in Henderson and Summerlin, you can hear it spoken back into being. After Oahu, Maui, Hawaii Island, Kauai, Molokai, Lanai, Niihau, and Kahoolawe, the locals say, there is one more island.
Las Vegas, The Place
Las Vegas sits in Clark County, in the dry bowl of the Las Vegas Valley, ringed by the Spring Mountains to the west and the McCullough Range to the south. The Strip cuts down Las Vegas Boulevard like a glittering spine, but the older city sits five miles north at Fremont Street, where the original downtown casinos still stand. Beyond that, the valley sprawls out into Henderson, North Las Vegas, Summerlin, and the cul-de-sac suburbs that have absorbed most of the city’s growth over the last thirty years.
The California Hotel sits a block off Fremont, on Ogden Avenue. It is not the biggest casino downtown, or the prettiest. But for a particular group of Americans, scattered across the desert, it is the anchor.
How Las Vegas Became Hawaii’s Ninth Island
Before the Hawaiians
Before the casinos, Las Vegas was a Mormon way station. In 1855, a group of thirty Latter-day Saints rode south from Utah to a spring in the Mojave, built a small fort, and called the place the Meadows. The town that grew around it was an unlikely mix: railroad workers after 1905, dam labourers in the 1930s, Air Force families after the war.
By the time Sam Boyd opened the California Hotel on January 1, 1975, the city had been a casino town for two generations. The Cal was a 325-room property meant for Southern Californians who would drive in over the Cajon Pass. It opened to a rough first year. Boyd needed another market, and he already had one in mind.
The Hawaiians Arrive
Sam Boyd had lived in Honolulu in the late 1930s. He had run bingo games for an entertainment company called Palace Amusements, and he had watched Hawaii residents play hard, play smart, and play often. When the California Hotel struggled, he flew back.
He cut deals with Western Airlines on cheap charter packages from Honolulu to Las Vegas, bundled with rooms and three meals a day at the Cal. He flew rice cookers in from the islands and asked his cooks to learn to make sticky rice properly. He hired a chef from Honolulu to put kalua pork, chicken long rice, and passion-orange-guava juice on the menu.
The flights filled. Junket representatives in Honolulu started bringing groups of as many as a hundred gamblers a week. By the late 1970s, locals were already half-joking that Las Vegas was the ninth island. It was, at first, a tourist nickname. Then, slowly, it became something else.
Las Vegas at Its Peak
What started as a Hawaiian holiday in 1975 had become, by the 1990s, a Hawaiian migration. Hawaii’s cost of living had been climbing for two decades. The price of a starter home in Honolulu was pulling away from local wages. Groceries, gasoline, and electricity all carried the freight cost of the Pacific. Younger people from Oahu, the Big Island, Maui, and Kauai started looking at the mainland with new eyes, and many of them were already familiar with Las Vegas through their parents’ charter flights to The Cal.
The math was brutal and obvious. A house in Las Vegas listed for roughly half what an equivalent home cost in Honolulu. Casino, hotel, restaurant, and construction jobs paid better than service work in Waikiki, with rent that left something at the end of the month. By 2006, Boyd Gaming was charting around 10,000 Hawaii visitors to Las Vegas every month, and roughly 80 percent of the California Hotel’s guests came from the islands. Many of those guests stopped going home.
The 1990 Census counted around 28,000 Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander residents in Las Vegas, about 4.5 percent of the population. Through the 1990s and 2000s, the non-Hispanic Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander population of Nevada roughly doubled, from 7,769 to 15,456. The community’s own count ran much higher. By the 2010s, residents talked about a Hawaii-born population in Clark County north of 50,000, with a broader Hawaii-local community, mixed and intermarried across generations, larger again.
The peak was not a single year. It was a long, layered moment from roughly 1995 to 2015 when the Ninth Island stopped being a nickname for the Cal’s lobby and became an identity. Hawaiian Civic Clubs chartered on the mainland. Prince Kuhio celebrations moved from church halls to civic centres. Hula halau opened in strip malls. Plate lunch counters multiplied. A first generation of Hawaii-born Las Vegans began raising children who had never seen the Pacific but knew every word of Iz’s “Over the Rainbow.”
The Change
The pandemic landed hard. Las Vegas, a tourism economy, lost its work overnight in 2020. Hawaii lost its visitors. Charter flights from Honolulu paused. The California Hotel went quiet. For the first time in fifty years, the room block that had defined the Ninth Island was empty.
The recovery has been steady but uneven. Vacations Hawaii charters resumed. Boyd Gaming’s Hawaii business came back. And during the long pause, more Hawaii residents than ever decided to leave the islands for good.
Demographers at the University of Hawaii have tracked a sustained outflow over the last decade, with Nevada as one of the top destinations alongside Washington, California, and Texas. Las Vegas has continued to gain Hawaii-born residents through the 2020s, even as a smaller, quieter countercurrent has moved the other way. Retirees, especially, are starting to fly back to the islands after twenty or thirty years on the mainland, drawn home by family and ageing parents.
The Landmarks of Hawaiian Las Vegas
The California Hotel and Casino, 12 Ogden Avenue. The anchor. Opened January 1, 1975, by Sam Boyd. The Cal is the room block, the kitchen, and the cultural front door of Hawaiian Las Vegas. Aloha is spoken at check-in. The carpet, the uniforms, and the signage all read island. For two generations of Hawaii residents, walking through the doors of the Cal has been the closest thing the mainland has to coming home.
Aloha Specialties, mezzanine, California Hotel. The plate-lunch counter on the mezzanine of the Cal is the unofficial dining room of the Ninth Island. The menu reads like a Honolulu strip mall: chicken katsu, teriyaki beef, loco moco, saimin, Spam musubi, oxtail soup. You order at the counter, take a number, sit at a wicker table under a paper umbrella, and wait for someone to call your name in a Pidgin accent that is older than most of the staff.
The Fremont Hotel and Main Street Station. Boyd Gaming’s two other downtown properties, both within a five-minute walk of the Cal, share the Hawaii business. Vacations Hawaii’s charter packages cycle guests across all three hotels, and more than half of Boyd’s downtown room nights are still booked by Hawaii customers.
Sam’s Town, 5111 Boulder Highway. Sam Boyd’s namesake locals’ casino on Boulder Highway, opened in 1979, has its own deep Hawaii following. It is further from downtown, but for Hawaii residents who have moved to the east valley, Sam’s Town is the neighbourhood spot. Hula performances, Hawaiian buffet nights, and ukulele shows have all run there over the years.
L&L Hawaiian Barbecue, valley-wide. The Hawaii-born plate-lunch chain has more than a dozen locations across Clark County, from Flamingo Road to Charleston Boulevard to North Las Vegas. They are weeknight restaurants, the kind a Hawaii-born family in Centennial Hills picks up dinner from on a Tuesday because somebody wants kalua pig with cabbage.
Pure Aloha Festival, Craig Ranch Regional Park. The largest Hawaiian festival on the mainland runs twice a year in North Las Vegas, drawing tens of thousands of attendees for hula competitions, Hawaiian music headliners flown in from the islands, plate lunch booths, and craft stalls. The 2026 spring edition was the festival’s 23rd. For the children of the Ninth Island, Pure Aloha turns the desert into Hawaii for a weekend.
Prince Kuhio Ho’olaule’a and Pacific Island Festival, Henderson. Hosted by the Las Vegas Hawaiian Civic Club, chartered in 1989. The Ho’olaule’a moved back to Henderson in October 2024 after a thirteen-year pause, and returns again in 2026. The civic club itself has been the community’s quiet backbone for more than three decades, running scholarship drives, language classes, and political advocacy on Native Hawaiian issues.
Where the Las Vegas Hawaiians Came From
The Ninth Island draws from every Hawaiian island, but the numbers tilt heavily toward Oahu. Most Las Vegas Hawaiians trace their move back to Honolulu, Waipahu, Pearl City, Aiea, or Kapolei. These are the neighbourhoods of working-class Oahu, the ones squeezed hardest by the cost-of-living climb, and the ones with the strongest existing relationships to Sam Boyd’s old charter business.
The Big Island sends the next biggest cohort, out of Hilo and Kona. Maui residents from Kahului and Wailuku have settled across Henderson and the southwest valley. Kauai sends steady arrivals from Lihue and Kapaa, with smaller numbers from Molokai and Lanai, often through family chains, one cousin pulling the next across the Pacific.
The community is not ethnically singular. Hawaii itself is the most racially mixed state in the country. The Las Vegas Hawaii community includes Native Hawaiians of Kanaka Maoli ancestry, Japanese Hawaiians, Filipino Hawaiians, Chinese Hawaiians, Portuguese Hawaiians, and Samoan, Tongan, and Marshallese family lines that arrived via the islands. What binds the group is not a single bloodline. It is a shared local identity built on language, food, music, and a way of being together that travels intact.
Las Vegas Today
The Ninth Island is no longer in one place. Unlike South Boston Irish or Bensonhurst Italian, there is no single Hawaiian neighbourhood in Las Vegas. The community is dispersed across the valley, with strong clusters in Henderson, Green Valley, Centennial Hills, Summerlin, North Las Vegas, and the southwest. People from Hawaii live everywhere here.
What holds the community together is not geography. It is the network of plate-lunch counters, the hula halau in strip malls, the LDS wards with strong Polynesian membership, the Catholic parishes where Hawaiian songs are sung at Christmas, the family luaus, and the group chats that pulse with news from home. The Cal is still the front door. Pure Aloha is still the festival. The Hawaiian Civic Club is still the keeper of the calendar.
The harder edge of the story is the colonial one. Hawaii was an independent kingdom until 1893, when American businessmen, backed by US Marines, overthrew Queen Liliuokalani. Statehood came in 1959. The cost-of-living crisis pushing Native Hawaiians off their own land is the long tail of that history, and many in the Las Vegas community carry that knowledge openly. The Ninth Island is a community of pride and warmth, but also of dislocation. It is a home built two thousand miles from home because home itself had become unaffordable.
What you hear, though, when you sit at Aloha Specialties on a Friday night, is not grief. It is family talking story. It is grandkids being introduced to second cousins. It is the sound of a community that did not let go of itself when it crossed an ocean. The Ninth Island is real, and it is still being built.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Hawaiians settle in Las Vegas?
The Hawaiian community in Las Vegas grew out of the California Hotel, which Sam Boyd opened in 1975 and marketed to Hawaii residents with charter flights, package deals, and local-style food. As Hawaii’s cost of living climbed through the 1990s and 2000s, many Hawaii residents who had visited Las Vegas through The Cal began moving permanently, drawn by cheaper housing, casino and hospitality jobs, and an established Hawaii community in the desert.
Is Las Vegas really Hawaii’s Ninth Island?
Las Vegas has been nicknamed Hawaii’s Ninth Island since the late 1970s, when so many Hawaii residents began travelling to and settling there that locals on both sides started calling it the unofficial ninth island after the actual eight Hawaiian islands. Clark County is now home to more than 20,000 residents who identify as Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, with community estimates of the broader Hawaii-born population running far higher, making it the largest Hawaii community outside the islands themselves.
What are the most famous Hawaiian landmarks in Las Vegas?
The California Hotel and Casino at 12 Ogden Avenue is the anchor of Hawaiian Las Vegas, along with Aloha Specialties on its mezzanine, the Fremont Hotel, Main Street Station, and Sam’s Town on Boulder Highway. The community also gathers around the Pure Aloha Festival at Craig Ranch Regional Park in North Las Vegas and the Prince Kuhio Ho’olaule’a in Henderson, with L&L Hawaiian Barbecue locations scattered across the valley as everyday community spots.
Where in Hawaii did the Las Vegas Hawaiians come from?
The Las Vegas Hawaiian community draws from all the islands, but most arrivals come from Oahu, particularly Honolulu, Waipahu, Pearl City, Aiea, and Kapolei. Other cohorts come from Hilo and Kona on the Big Island, Kahului and Wailuku on Maui, Lihue on Kauai, and smaller numbers from Molokai and Lanai, often through family chains where one relative pulls the next across the Pacific.
When did Hawaiians first arrive in Las Vegas?
Hawaii residents began visiting Las Vegas regularly after Sam Boyd opened the California Hotel on January 1, 1975, with airline packages and charter flights from Honolulu. The transition from visitors to settlers accelerated through the late 1980s and 1990s as Hawaii’s housing and cost of living climbed, and by the 2000s Las Vegas was recognised as the largest Hawaii community on the mainland.
If your family’s story passed through Honolulu, Hilo, Kahului, or Lihue, and now sits in Henderson or Summerlin or North Las Vegas, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the islands your grandparents knew to the desert valley that became Hawaii’s Ninth Island, your story is a real place on a real map.