Great question. Though the Landmark is long forgotten -- and anyone who ever had anything to do with said "Good riddance" when it fell -- it’s perhaps the most spectacular casino failure of them all, which makes it a tale well worth telling.
The idea of erecting a space-age hotel-casino tower and shopping district on a corner of Paradise Road and Convention Center Drive occurred to Kansas City developer Frank Carroll and his wife Susan in 1960. A year later, the Carrolls bought the 22-acre lot across from the new Las Vegas Convention Center, which was vacant except for a gas station, with a $3.3 million loan from Whirlpool Corporation’s finance company, the Appliance Buyers Credit Corporation.
At first, Carroll planned to build a 16-story tower, in order to one-up the Fremont Hotel downtown as the tallest building in Nevada. But the Mint Hotel began building its 26-story tower around the same time, so Carroll upped the height of the Landmark to 31 stories and 346 feet. Unfortunately, he went broke when the finance company refused to extend his credit for a skyscraper war.
The Landmark sat, a half-finished shell, for the next three years. Due to a line of slightly slanting utility poles running by, the tower seemed to tilt, earning it the nicknames "Leaning Tower of Las Vegas" and, of course, "Frank’s Folly." A few shots of the Landmark at this time can be seen in the 1964 Elvis movie Viva Las Vegas.
In 1966, the seemingly bottomless Teamsters Union Pension Fund fronted Carroll another $5.5 million to finish the hotel. Completed in spring 1968 seven years after construction began, it stood a full seven feet taller than the Mint.
The original opening date was announced for New Year’s Eve 1967; it didn’t come close. A second grand opening celebration was planned for April 1968, but by then, even Frank Carroll didn’t believe it: A month earlier, he hadn’t even applied for a gaming license. And to add insult to injury, when he did apply a few months later, the Gaming Commission rejected his application. The Landmark immediately went up for sale.
But by this time, no one in his right mind would touch the place.
Of course, it’s long been argued that Howard Hughes was far from being in his right mind, and against the advice of all his advisors and just about everyone else who knew anything about hotels or casinos, Hughes saw an opportunity there.
Frank Carroll owed more than $6 million to three dozen creditors. He was also on the hook to the Teamsters for $9 million in principal and accrued interest. And Hughes’s recent attempt to buy the Stardust had been shot down by federal anti-trust authorities. However, his purchase offer of $17.3 million was so generous (it even cashed out Carroll for more than $2 million), the regulators could scarcely refuse. In January 1969, they approved the sale.
Why did Hughes buy such a white elephant? One theory has it that, unlike the other properties in his portfolio, the Landmark when he took it over had never operated as a casino. That allowed the infamous control freak to personally authorize every design detail, from the hotel-room bath fixtures to the length of the cocktail waitress mini-skirts. (Also, read The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People, a 1981 book by Irving Wallace and David Wallachinsky, and you too might agree that Hughes saw it as a "landmark" to his somewhat, shall we say, quirky sex life.)
Hughes was also in a hurry and he spent an additional $4 million to open the joint on July 2, 1969: finishing and furnishing the 525-room hotel, applying for gaming and liquor licenses, contracting vendors, hiring and training hundreds of employees, booking opening acts, even closing escrow.
Why was Hughes in such a hurry? His archrival, Kirk Kerkorian, planned to open his $60 million 1,500-room International Hotel directly across Paradise Road, one day later, on July 3.
Both hotels opened over the July Fourth weekend. Barbra Streisand headlined at the International, while Danny Thomas appeared in the 31st-floor Top o’ the Landmark lounge, atop the three-story circular observation deck. Five hundred invited guests showed up to celebrate the culmination of the epic nine-year project to open the joint, and Thomas attracted a good crowd of gamblers and partiers, though Hughes could have saved himself a lot of money and trouble, and rounded up half of Nevada to populate the Landmark to boot, if he’d simply shown up himself.
Though the grand opening had a little razzmatazz, the excitement was short-lived; true to form, the Landmark lost a reported $5 million in its first week of operation, thus propelling it into a long slow decline.
After Hughes lost interest in and left Las Vegas in 1970, Summa Corporation embarked on a decade of benign neglect in relation to its casinos, and the Landmark continued down down down. The nadir was reached on July 15, 1977, when a carbon-monoxide leak circulated through the hotel's air-conditioning system, killing one guest, injuring 100 others, and displacing 1,000 more.
By the early ‘80s, the Landmark was a financial disaster and in 1982, Summa unloaded the joint to Las Vegan William Morris, who sunk a little more money into sprucing up the place, making a few exterior cosmetic enhancements, though leaving alone the deteriorating interior, and renaming it the New Landmark.
Morris’ last-ditch effort managed to keep the Landmark open through the 1980s, and it even achieved something of a retro cult status with younger visitors who appreciated the view from the lounge and restaurant, though they’d never dream of actually staying there. (Indeed, this writer remembers a harrowing elevator ride to the top of the tower in 1988, in which his life passed before his eyes more than once during the 20-minute ordeal.)
Mercifully, with debts reaching $35 million, the Landmark closed in August 1991. Still, there it stood, like a bad dream, dark and deserted for several years.
The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority bought the Landmark in 1993 for $16.7 million. After some debate about the fate of the place, the LVCVA wisely decided to level it. However, in a final twist of irony, several historic preservation groups actually took the LVCVA to the Nevada Supreme Court in an effort to save the decrepit and doomed property; the justices wisely decided to let the LVCVA level it.
Still, one last indignity remained. In 1994, in preparation for the implosion, AB-Haz Environmental, Inc., an asbestos abatement consulting firm based in Nevada, was hired to remove the Landmark’s insulation. Apparently, two Ab-Haz employees violated federal Clean Air Act standards and were prosecuted by U.S. attorneys. Rocco Dipentino and Dennis Price (aka Rafiq Ali) were sentenced to five months in prison and five months of home detention and fined $18,000.
Also in 1994, the tower was lit up for one night for the filming of Casino; the entrance was used as the location for the movie’s Tangiers Hotel.
Finally, at 4:39 during the wee hours of November 07, 1995, Controlled Demolition Inc. imploded the gutted Landmark tower using 100 pounds of explosives. It took 17 seconds to reduce the 30-odd-year-old building to dust. The LVCVA paved Paradise and put up a 2,000-space parking lot.
As for your friend’s $500 casino chips, the window of opportunity for cashing them closed more than 15 years ago. However, they might be worth a little something to collectors; check http://www.ccgtcc.com; this is the Casino Chip and Gaming Token Collectors Club, where you'll find people who'll no doubt be interested in your collector's items.
