The Las Vegas Club first opened in 1931 on the southeast corner of First and Fremont streets, over which Vegas Vic now presides. Yes, it was originally across the street and up the block from its present location.
The original Las Vegas Club building first housed the Isis Theater, one of three on Fremont Street in the early days. The Isis was replaced in 1921 by the Las Vegas Hotel and Café, then the Smokehouse restaurant, then the Bank Club, and finally, in 1930, the Las Vegas Club, which opened in anticipation of the legalizing of casino gambling.
Also in 1930, the Las Vegas Club installed the first neon sign on a casino in Las Vegas. It was the second neon sign on Fremont Street, which only a few years earlier had a single lightbulb to illuminate that corner of the street at night.
The Las Vegas Club received one of Las Vegas’ original gambling licenses in 1931. It remained in that location until 1949, when then-owner J. Kell Houssels moved it across the street to the northeast corner of Fremont and Main, where it remains to this day. The original Las Vegas Club became the Pioneer, to which Vegas Vic was attached six years later in 1955.
The Las Vegas Club moved into the ground-floor lobby of the New Overland Hotel. The original Overland Hotel was built in 1906 by John Wisner, who bought the property at the railroad auction a year earlier for the princely sum of $1,750.
On May 24, 1911, the Overland burned to the ground; one life was lost and it sustained an estimated $35,000 in damage. The volunteer fire department, with two hoses and a hand cart, could do little but watch it burn. However, this fire was one of the motivating factors for Las Vegas to incorporate a year later; one of the benefits of incorporating was a modern fire department.
The hotel was rebuilt and renamed the New Overland Hotel. Numerous postcards of downtown Las Vegas show the New Overland sign, which also included "The Big Free Sample Room," essentially a showroom where salesmen traveling on the train could set out their wares for sale. Reportedly, the Big Free Sample Room inspired the city fathers to pursue convention business.
A couple of bars -- the Chatterbox and the Talk of the Town -- occupied the first floor of the Overland, which remained "new" for nearly 40 years.
In 1949, Kell Houssels moved the Las Vegas Club in to the first floor of the New Overland, which remained open on the second floor, with its own new neon sign.
In 1961, Jackie Gaughan and Mel Exber bought both the Las Vegas Club and the Overland and turned the whole building into the hotel-casino. They renovated it from top and bottom, adding 150 rooms, a sports theme, and a design that emulated Ebbets Field, where the Brooklyn Dodgers played up till three years earlier, when they moved to Los Angeles.
In 1980, a 224-room tower was built. In 1996, Gaughan and Exber added a $30 million 188-room tower complete with an actual hotel lobby, along with a casino expansion and two new restaurants. It has 410 rooms today.
For years, the Las Vegas Club advertised liberal blackjack rules: double down on any two, three, or four cards and split and resplit any pair. You could also surrender and six-card hands were winners.
In a surprise move in December 2002, casino mogul Jackie Gaughan, 82 at the time, after having owned the Las Vegas Club for more than 40 years, announced that he’d sold it, along with the Plaza, Gold Spike, and Western hotel-casinos, to Barrick Gaming for $82 million. The deal closed in March 2004.
A month later in April 2004, Barrick unveiled a massive several-hundred-million-dollar redevelopment plan for downtown that included adding 1,200 rooms and 1,200 timeshare units to the Plaza, along with a historic "street" on vacant acreage behind the casino. The Plaza was to be linked to the Las Vegas Club by a pedestrian overpass. Barrick was also going to buy the Queen of Hearts and Nevada Club properties on Main Street and expand their casinos, redevelop the Western with a Latin theme, and build an 8,000-seat portable sports arena. Details concerning a source of financing were not forthcoming and the whole plan seemed like a pipe dream to local pundits, even in the midst of an exploding economy with dozens of cranes dotting the skyline.
In September 2004, Barrick changed the name Las Vegas Club to just Vegas Club. It was part of a move to project a hipper image downtown, akin to Treasure Island’s switch to TI.
However, less than a year later, Barrick sold its minority interest in the four hotels to its landlord and silent majority partner, Tamares, which had put up much of the original purchase price for the four downtown casinos.
Tamares is closing the hotel rooms at the Plaza for renovations expected to take a year. We’ll see; the Lady Luck was supposed to open in a year, four years ago. The Vegas Club, so far, isn’t affected by plans for the Plaza (which scored a coup when it acquired the high-end furniture from the unfinished Fontainebleau in a recent auction).
