That casino was called Bourbon Street.
The building opened in 1980 as the Shenandoah Hotel with 166 rooms and no casino. Wayne Newton was one of the original investors. In 1984, it went bankrupt and closed.
In 1985 a Canada-based company, Carma Ltd., reopened the property, with a New Orleans theme and the new name, Bourbon Street. Carma was the first non-U.S.-based company to obtain a Nevada gambling license and this incarnation had a 15,000-square-foot casino with 350 slots and 12 table games.
In 1995, Crown Casino Company, which had just opened a casino in Louisiana, bought Bourbon Street for $10 million. At the time, the casino had 430 machines and 15 tables, still occupying 15,000 square feet. Crown couldn’t make a go of it and the casino closed in 1996, not to reopen for another year.
Between 1997 and 2005, Bourbon Street changed hands seven times, including a short stretch in which it was owned by Starwood Resorts. The entertainment offerings ran the gamut of low-rent magicians and hypnotists and freak shows.
Finally, in March 2005, Harrah’s picked up Bourbon Street for an inflated $61 million; at the time, it also acquired several surrounding properties to put together an eight-acre parcel just off the Strip. Harrah’s ran the hotel and non-gaming amenities, while United Coin ran the casino as a glorified slot route.
In an interesting twist, shortly after Hurricane Katrina emptied New Orleans, Bourbon Street served as a temporary shelter for a couple hundred employees from Gulf Coast casinos. Ironically, to escape the Big Easy, they wound up a hotel named Bourbon Street.
Harrah’s intended to keep Bourbon Street open through October 31, 2005, but a broken water main closed the joint for good on October 18.
In January 2006, demolition work began; Bourbon Street was imploded on February 14, Valentine’s Day, 2006.
Harrah’s planned to incorporate the Bourbon Street site into a metaresort, potentially occupying land from the south edge of the Sands Expo Center to the north side of Harmon Avenue. In her book, Winner Takes All, Christina Binkley described an early version of the project as a 10-year, $13 billion, 10-hotel development, aligned around a grand boulevard and called Epicentre. Also proposed to cross the site was a pedestrian bridge to connect Bally’s and the Flamingo.
None of that ever came to pass and as of this writing, as far as we know, no plans exist for the vacant lot you were wondering about.
