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Las Vegas and the 90s Boom

March 23, 2010 By

The Mirage Hotel opened on 22nd November 1989, and the Strip has never been the same since. Whilst Las Vegas Boulevard had seen mega-resorts before, such as Kirk Kerkorian’s International and MGM, a young Steve Wynn raised the stakes with his Mirage and started a trend that transformed 1990s Las Vegas.

Steve Wynn’s Vegas career started in the 1960s when he took a minority stake in the Frontier Hotel and made a dollar and a cent as a liquor distributor. It was as manager of Downtown’s Golden Nugget in the 1970s that he really cut his teeth in the casino business. He went on to build a Golden Nugget in Atlantic City, and next came the Mirage.

The Mirage is a 3,000 room casino hotel, notable for a man-made volcano that stops people in their tracks as they walk past. As soon as it was launched the hotel started grossing a million bucks a day, and Wynn’s reputation for delivering outstanding product was cemented. The high quality of service, design and build quality are what set the Mirage apart from the casinos that had gone before it.

William Bennett is another important figure in 1990s Las Vegas. After buying Jay Sarno’s Circus Circus and turning it into a cash cow he went on to build the 4,000 room Excalibur. Aimed at a lower market segment than that Wynn was chasing, it became an instant hit when it opened seven months after the Mirage.

At this stage in the Strip’s evolution it was time for Kirk Kerkorian to step back into the fray, and he did so in style by building a new 5005 room MGM Grand. This one billion dollar project opened in 1993 and went after all market segments with success. At the same time as Kerkorian was working on MGM, Wynn was building Treasure Island, and Bennett was developing the Luxor. Between them these three men were transforming the Strip. The tail end of 1993 was dramatic indeed: 9th October, Luxor opens; 27th October, Treasure Island opens; 18th December, MGM Grand opens.

These hotels recognized that Las Vegas visitors were no longer gambling-focused men, but families looking for entertainment of all types. With this new broader market to tap, new hotels continued to be built through the 1990s: Excalibur (1990), Rio (1990), Luxor (1993), MGM Grand (1993), Treasure Island (1993), Hard Rock (1995), Monte Carlo (1996), Stratosphere (1996), New York, New York (1997), Bellagio (1998), Mandalay Bay (1999), Paris (1999), Venetian (1999), new Aladdin (2000). 1990s Las Vegas. What a decade.

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Boxer, Pilot, Mogul. The Kerkorian Story.

March 23, 2010 By

The founders of the Strip, Thomas Hull (opened El Rancho Vegas in April 1941) and R.E. Griffith (opened in October 1942), have long since been forgotten ,and remain in the shadows of flamboyant developer-showmen like Bugsy, Jay Sarno and Steve Wynn. Another major figure in the Strip’s modern transformation is Kirk Kerkorian, of MGM Kerkorian fame.

Kerkorian was an amateur boxer with a 29-4 record, before becoming a commercial pilot in 1941. After serving with Canada’s Royal Air Force during the war he went on to become a plane dealer, and eventually start his own airline. After selling Trans International Airlines for $104 million in 1968 he started investing in Vegas. Kerkorian had already invested in the Dunes by this time, and flipped 80 acres of land to Sarno’s Caesar’s Palace, but as his airline cash came in he wanted to place some bigger bets on Vegas.

In 1967 Kerkorian bought 82 acres on Paradise Road, and the Flamingo. By 1969 he had built and opened The International, a 30-storey hotel with 1,500 rooms and a 30,000 square feet casino. Maintaining his trading track record Kerkorian sold both The International and the Flamingo to Hilton Hotels a year later. The International set the standard for the mega-resorts to come, both in terms of scale and layout.

Next came the MGM Grand in 1973, which Kerkorian built in 1973 right next to the Flamingo. It was instantly the most stylish of the Strip hotels. Hardly surprising given the $104 million that was invested in this 2,100 room spectacle. Unfortunately the MGM Kerkorian hotel was engulfed in flames in 1980, killing 87 people. Although the hotel was rebuilt eight months later, Kerkorian’s plans for further expansion were on hold. The next phase of the Strip’s development belonged to Steve Wynn.

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The Start of the Strip

March 19, 2010 By

The Strip started out life as Route 91, thus the name of some of its first nightclubs: 91 Club. Back in the 1940s 91 Club struggled to compete with Downtown, and folks weren’t attracted to spending their leisure time on what was considered the Los Angeles Highway. Things changed with the opening of El Rancho Vegas in April 1941. This casino hotel, developed by Thomas Hull, had retail, restaurants, shows, horse riding, a pool, and 63 rooms. It was the beginning of the Strip as we know it. The path to mega-resorts offering rooms, restaurants, entertainment, sports and even Las Vegas Strip Condos was in motion.

Following in Hull’s footsteps was developer R.E. Griffith who bought up 175 acres on the highway and built the Last Frontier. Opening in October 1942 this was Vegas’s first themed casino and its tribute to the wild west proved popular. The Carrillo Bar was named after the Cisco Kid’s sidekick, and there were stuffed animals throughout the casino.

Next came the casino that people mistakenly think was the start of the Strip. Billy Wilkerson, founder of the Hollywood Reporter, bought 33 acres south of the Last Frontier in 1945 and started construction of the Flamingo in April of the same year. Wilkerson had Gus Greenbaum and Moe Sedway as operating partners despite their links to organized crime, but the biggest problem was that he was a degenerate gambler. He gambled on the development itself when he started it without sufficient funds to complete it, and he also lots thousands of dollars of his own money as he played the tables during the construction period. The project ran out of money, and crime boss Meyer Lansky came in with $1m to invest.

Soon after Lansky’s cash injection one of his representatives, Benjamin Siegel, came to oversee the investment. Bugsy Siegel first split the project with Wilkerson, and then moved on to take the whole thing over. But Bugsy was no developer, and cost overruns and changes led to a delayed opening in December 1946. It opened without the rooms being complete and thus the casino could not generate the funds to maintain operations: the Flamingo closed just one month after it had opened.

It was in March 1947 that the Flamingo reopened with 93 rooms available. It pretty quickly started to generate profits, but it seems that the mob had not forgotten the cost overruns: in June 1947 Bugsy was killed, and Gus Greenbaum and Moe Sedway stepped in to run operations.

In the story of Las Vegas it is easy to forget the credit due to the true pioneers: Thomas Hull and R.E. Griffith. In the story of the Flamingo it is easy to forget the importance of Billy Wilkerson’s initial vision, and the operational skills of Greenbaum and Sedway. For many people it will always be Bugsy who built the Strip.

The Flamingo opened up a new market to Las Vegas of more sophisticated customers than those that visited Downtown. Once the Flamingo’s success was proven the Strip underwent a period of rapid development in the 1950s. The western-themed Thunderbird opened in 1948, and the Palm Springs-inspired Desert Inn opened in 1950. With each new development the luxury was ratcheted up, and the Desert Inn provided the Strip’s first golf course. Next came the Sahara, followed by the Sands, the Royal Nevada, the Dunes and the Riviera. All of these hotels were complete by 1955 and the Strip had just witnessed the first of its building booms. But the growth spurt still had legs, and the Hacienda opened in 1956, the Tropicana in 1957, and the Stardust in 1958.  The Stardust was the first hotel to realize the potential of the mass market, and its 1,000 rooms were soon filled with average folks who enjoyed gambling.

It was in the 1960s that Jay Sarno came along with the concept of massive themed resorts. The creator of Caesar’s Palace and Circus Circus, Sarno was a visionary. When Caesar’s opened in 1966 it was an instant hit. Sarno doubled up and took his Caesar’s profits to build Circus Circus. It was not until Sarno sold Circus Circus to William Bennett and William Pennington in 1974 that it started performing well. The two Williams toned down the circus act, removed the admission fee and targeted the mass market. Despite the mixed results of his hotels Sarno and paved the way for future casino developers who had grand ideas for the Strip. The ideas would eventually extend outside of casinos to Las Vegas Strip Condos, but that development phase has had mixed results.

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