Happy to oblige.
The question was: I remember reading your history of the Stardust and now that it’s gone, do you think that Caesars takes its place as having the most sordid past of all the Las Vegas casinos? And if you do, how about telling us about it?
We wrote: The Tropicana’s past (not to mention its present) is no picnic. And Planet Hollywood’s history sports assorted sordidness, to say the least. And some downtown joints could tell a few stories.
Though Caesars Palace's could've been sordid behind the scenes over the years, in our opinion, it doesn't have too risqué a past.
One story, which we told in QoD 6/22/06, dates back to the days when Kirk Kerkorian owned the property that Caesars Palace was built on; he leased the land to Caesars for the first few years, till he sold it to them.
According to Dick Odessky, a long-time Las Vegas insider and author of the memoir Fly on the Wall -- Recollections of Las Vegas’ Good Old Bad Old Days, Steve Wynn heard that the Dunes Hotel had given a 40-foot-wide parcel in the extreme northern corner of the Caesars lot to the state of Nevada to use for an off-ramp for the impending interstate highway (I-15). The parcel was in excess of what was needed for the ramp, so the state gave it back to the Dunes, which sold the small plot to Howard Hughes' Summa Corporation. Summa, in turn, sold it to young Steve Wynn, who was barely 22 years old at the time.
Wynn proceeded to announce plans to build a small motel, slot arcade, and newsstand on the tiny parcel alongside Caesars Palace.
We pick up Odessky at this point. "At the time, few believed that Wynn ever intended to go ahead with the development. But the owners of Caesars Palace were in no position to risk having a grind joint attached like a tumor to their ultimate pleasure palace. They bought the land from Wynn for what was said to be a profit of at least a million dollars for the young entrepreneur, who used the money to begin buying up stock in the downtown Golden Nugget, the first building block in his casino empire.
"As a result, Kerkorian was subjected to a lot of ridicule by the Caesars Palace operators, who reportedly used Kirk's error of omission to work out a lower purchase price when they eventually bought the Caesars Palace land from him. Ever since that time, some of us have believed that Kerkorian would one day repay Wynn."
Other than that, and a few -- shall we say -- colorful characters who worked at the resort-casino over the years, what's true about Caesars is three-fold. First, of all the hotels in the world, Caesars Palace is one of the most famous, and rightly so. Actually, the fact that Caesars has so much to recommend it as an international tourist destination might explain why Steve Wynn felt he had to spend $650 million -- five times more than the cost of any casino before it -- to put the Mirage next door.
Second, it's had a number of owners, especially recently (in the past 15 years).
And third, it's undergone more expansions, perhaps, than any other casino in the world, let alone in Las Vegas.
Conventional history gives the credit for Caesars Palace to Jay Sarno, hotel builder and owner of the Cabana Motor Inn chain (though Ed Reid, in his book Grim Reapers -- a sort of sequel to Green Felt Jungle -- reports that Sarno was merely a front man).
In any event, Sarno received nearly $11 million in loans from the Teamsters Central States Pension Fund in 1962 and began planning the most opulent casino-hotel the world had ever seen, to be built on 34 acres of center-Strip property owned by Kirk Kerkorian. Ground was broken in 1965.
The hotel was built for $25 million, almost all of which came from loans from the Teamsters. It opened in August 1966, with 680 rooms in a crescent-shaped 14-story tower, the famous Bacchanal restaurant, and the 1,200-seat Circus Maximus Showroom. Eighteen fountains spewing 35-foot-high columns of water and 50-foot-tall cypress trees lined the long approach to the front doors; the casino was -- and still is -- set back 135 feet from the Strip. The fountains, reportedly, held 350,000 gallons of water and of the total, upwards of 10,000 gallons were continuously erupting from the pools.
After the initial success of Caesars, Sarno bought the property from Kerkorian for $5 million.
Three years later, in 1969, the hotel was bought by Lum’s Corporation, which owned a chain of 440 restaurants around the country. On July 4th of that year, ground was broken for a new 14-story tower, dubbed Centurion, on the north side of the property. According to legend, Lum executives buried a time capsule where the foundation was going; a week later, when the concrete trucks arrived, they found that the time capsule had been stolen.
In 1970, the 14-story 222-room Centurion Tower was added. Another expansion in 1974 incorporated the 16-story, 361-room $16 million Roman Tower. Then, in 1979, Caesars added the $47 million 22-story 600-room Olympic Tower, which boasted 10 two-story two- to four-bedroom suites, complete with sunken tubs, round beds, and giant wet bars; one of them hosted Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman in the movie Rain Man.
Another $20 million expansion in 1985 opened the NASAesque race and sports book, with 21 video screens, one of them 19 by 26 feet, the largest in Las Vegas at the time.
The $100 million 250,000-square-foot Forum Shops at Caesars first phase opened in 1992. A 240,000-square-foot expansion of the mall was completed in August 1997. and a second expansion was completed in October 2004, which added a Strip entrance to the mall, as well as four Mitsubishi spiral escalators. The Forum Shops at Caesars is the most successful mall in the country, attracting close to 20 million visitors a year and earning more than $1,300 per square foot of retail space (the average mall earns in the $250 range).
In 1995, ITT Corporation bought Caesars World Inc. for $1.7 billion, which included Caesars Palaces in Lake Tahoe and Atlantic City, as well as the Desert Inn in Las Vegas. ITT invested another billion dollars in expanding and upgrading the at-the-time 32-year-old-and- aging joint.
Two years later, Starwood Hotel and Resorts acquired control of ITT, which included Caesars (and the DI) for $3.2 billion.
In November 1997, Caesars opened the $495 million 1,134-room Palace Tower, which gave it more thqan 3,500 rooms, placing it on the Top Ten list of most rooms for the first time.
Two years after that in 1999, Starwood unloaded it on Park Place Entertainment Inc., the casino division of Hilton Hotels, for $3 billion. Park Place spent more billions expanding and upgrading the place.
Then, in July 2004, Harrah’s Entertainment bought Caesars Entertainment, which included Caesars, Bally’s, Paris, and the Flamingo, for $5 billion; the deal was consummated in 2005.
In August 2004, the long people mover that for decades conveyed patrons into Caesars from the corner of the Strip and Flamingo Ave. was replaced by a $40 million five-acre entertainment and retail plaza, complete with the first new porte cochere at Caesars since 1979, a 230-seat Italian indoor-outdoor restaurant and bar, an outdoor arena that seats 1,750, and a 200-seat wedding and events venue.
In September 2005, the $289 million 26-story 949-all=suite Augustus Tower opened on W. Flamingo Rd. near the corner of the Strip. It brought Caesars’ room count to more than 3,300.
Finally (phew!), in August 2007, Harrah’s announced a whopping billion-dollar expansion and upgrade of Caesars, including a new 665-room hotel tower, a complete remodel of the 512-room Forum Tower, new restaurants and entertainment options, an enlarged front entrance and valet area, an upgraded sports book, three new pools and outdoor spa, and a 263,000-square-foot convention center. The new tower will bring the total number of rooms at Caesars to 4,013. This is Harrah’s largest capital-improvement investment to date in Las Vegas, but it's currently on hold. The exterior of the new tower has been completed, but Harrah's has delayed completing the interior till the Las Vegas room market, which is overcrowded and depressed, begins to recover.
One final note: The hotel’s name was the object of one of the all-time great editorial decisions over the use of a single apostrophe. After critical consideration and long deliberation, the possessive apostrophe in "Caesar’s" was purged, because Jay Sarno wanted to imply not that the hotel belonged to a single all-powerful Caesar, but that every guest in his hotel was a Caesar (of sorts) and should feel like a Roman emperor.
