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The Hotel Apache opened in 1932. It was built by P.O. Silvagni, an Italian immigrant who, though he spoke little English, was a builder in Utah, held one of the concrete contracts for Hoover Dam, and bought the vacant lot at 128 Fremont Street for $30,000, envisioning all the dam workers needing a place to blow off steam on Saturday nights. It was the first Las Vegas hotel to have air-conditioning in the lobby, protected by an air curtain at the entrance. It was also the first with an elevator and a carpeted casino.
The building was eventually leased by Benny Binion, who ran the rooms above the Horseshoe Casino for friends and players. Binion’s was purchased by TLC Casino Enterprises, which also owns the Four Queens, in 2004 and the rooms were closed in 2008 due to the economic downturn; the building itself is still owned by the Silvagni family., which has collected rent for decades. Eighty of the original rooms reopened in late July 2019.
Code restrictions prevented moving walls to increase the size of the rooms, so they were refurbished and decorated to look like they did in the ’30s: hardwood floors, stained-glass windows, historic photos, and antique furnishings, including old phones and radios, and queen beds only, though with the mod cons, such as flat-screen TVs and upgraded bathrooms.
Binion's is touting it as downtown's "Historic Haunted Hotel" where unexplained and unexplainable phenomena—spirits doing odd stuff—take place on a reportedly regular basis; the hotel rooms were featured on the Travel Channel show “Ghost Adventures” in March 2019.
