Growing up in the shadow of the Hoover Dam, Keegan Strouse has always been captivated by the history of the Depression-era buildings that once served the mammoth government project erected nearby.
At night, he and a friend would sneak into the Boulder Dam Hotel, scouting for ghosts in the basement of the inn that for decades had played host to the likes of billionaire Howard Hughes and President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Then, this July, the 27-year-old graduate architecture student at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas read an Internet post that rocked those boyhood memories: the Boulder City Hospital, where injured dam workers were long treated, was facing the wrecking ball.