The Elvis-A-Rama Museum was an 8,000-square-foot museum on Industrial Road in back of the Stardust that opened in early 2000. It consisted of the "world's largest private collection of Elvis-owned memorabilia," the largest referring to upwards of 2,000 items, the private referring to Chris Davidson, editor of Hot Boat magazine. Davidson bought most of the memorabilia from Jimmy Velvet, a friend and distant cousin of Elvis who started collecting the items shortly after Elvis died in 1977.
The collection was a mecca for Elvis aficionados: everything from his original blue-suede shoes to his first Cadillac. One display showed the Last Frontier hotel bill from one of Elvis' first gigs in Las Vegas; in two weeks, he spent a grand total of $207.07. Another held his guns, such as the 1970 Smith & Wesson .38 Special with a gold-plated trigger. Elvis's American Express card, his Rolls Royce insurance policy, jumpsuits, guitars, pianos, and every commercially released 45, EP, and LP ever recorded by Elvis -- they were all on display.
So was, of course, the 80-foot-long eponymous mural commissioned by Jimmy Velvet with nearly a half-million signatures on it.
Elvis tributes were performed in the small theater several times a day by a rotating crew of Elvis impersonators.
One Elvis impersonator, improbably, solved a major robbery of the Elvis-A-Rama that occurred in March 2004. The thief stole a tow truck to break though the back door of the museum and stole $300,000 worth of jewelry. However, he must have found it hard to fence; in one of the dumbest-criminal outcomes on record, he approached Duke Adams, the impersonator, and offered to sell him all the stolen jewelry, which, as he reeled off the descriptions, Adams recognized as some of the stolen goods. When the thief returned with the items, the police couldn't believe that all $300,000 worth were in the same place.
In September 2005, Robert Sillerman, principal in CKX and its subsidiary Elvis Presley Enterprises, which operated Presley’s Graceland and owns the "American Idol" brand, acquired all the assets of Elvis-A-Rama, including the trademark to the name, the related website, and most of the memorabilia. CKX also accumulated 18 acres on the Strip from the Harley-Davidson Café to Smith and Wollensky’s to build an Elvis-themed attraction, rumored at the time to be a major hotel-casino-museum. The Elvis-A-Rama museum closed on October 1, though the deal allowed Chris Davidson to take the Elvis-A-Rama mural and the memorabilia that CKX didn’t buy and open a museum in Hawaii, which served as the location of three of Elvis’ films.
A year later, CKX revealed details about its planned $3.1 billion Elvis-themed condo-hotel-casino project. The resort, with a tentative completion date of 2012, was to consist of two hotels with 3,047 rooms and 147 condos, a 93,000-square-foot casino, a convention center, a 1,605-seat showroom, and 14 restaurants, along with the Elvis attraction. At the time, we commented that it sounded "speculative" to us, since funding wasn’t secured and the Harley Davidson Café, Smith & Wollensky’s, and Hawaiian Marketplace would have had to come down before the Elvis hotel could begin to go up.
Then, in November 2008, CKX announced that it was "unlikely" its Elvis-themed resort would be built. And finally, in May 2009, the project collapsed when CKX defaulted on a $454 million loan and was served with an auction notice by lenders.
Neither did an Elvis museum ever open, as far as we know, in Hawaii.
All the stuff, ostensibly, is still in Davidson’s and Sillermans’ collections, though what might eventually happen to it is anyone’s guess.
