The Reserve, which opened in 1998 after a two-year delay, was Ameristar Casino's second property in this state, following the much earlier opening of Cactus Pete's Desert Lodge upstate in 1954, in what is now Jackpot, Nevada. Ten years later, original owner "Cactus Pete" Piersanti took over the neighboring Horseshu Club, with both properties subsequently coming under the partial control of Ray Neilsen of Twin Falls, Idaho, whose company had built many of the structures at Cactus Pete's.
In the following years, the company continued to expand, making its first purchase outside of Jackpot in 1992 when it acquired a Vicksburg, Mississippi, property known as Delta Pointe. The company was renamed Ameristar Casinos, Inc. and went public in 1993, prior to opening several riverboat casinos.
Then, in 1998, Ameristar, which had returned to its Nevada roots and relocated company HQ from Twin Falls to Las Vegas, debuted the $125 million Reserve hotel-casino in Henderson. It was the heyday of casino theming, and The Reserve, designed by Henry Conversano -- previously responsible for the game-changing Mirage -- took the motif to an extreme with African references throughout. One gushing account that we read from the time described how the displays and adornments "bring the African bush to life as you drive onto the property and begin a journey into the heart of Africa." The current writer never visited the property, but senses an element of hyperbole...
Still, the entrance was flanked by a 120-foot archway formed from two giant elephant tusks, and the structure itself was based on a Moorish castle (the last time we checked, Morocco was hardly the heart of the African bush, but we'll let that slide), decorated on the outside by hand-painted murals of big game "roaming broad African plains, veldts, and savannahs." The porte-cochere was described as a canvas-roofed structure designed to evoke images of bedouin tents (no comment). The theming was continued throughout, from the names of the restaurants, to the artwork in the public areas, to the room decor. Recordings of parrot noises filled the air, playful monkeys decorated the fixtures, and the casino chips depicted elephants and giraffes. There was even a fake plane wreckage, belonging to a fictitious explorer.
Still, despite the attention to detail and conviction that the public was eager to be wowed by a new themed experience, not to mention good video poker and blackjack games, The Reserve was a disaster from the start. In the fourth quarter of 1998, Ameristar lost $2.5 million, which president and CEO Craig Neilsen blamed substantially on "the Reserve's disappointing results in 1998." Sunset Station had opened the previous year, and it transpired that Henderson just wasn't yet ready to support another "locals" casino, whose grandiose vision didn't gel with the market's taste, evidently. There wasn't enough of a pull from the area yet to entice customers from the Strip, leaving the Reserve as something of a white elephant in the desert.
Aggressive marketing initiatives followed, but to no avail, and in 2001 the property was purchased by Station Casinos for just $70 million, in a deal that saw Station offload two Missouri casinos to Ameristar. Having already just purchased George Maloof's Fiesta (now Fiesta Rancho), Station kept with the branding and renamed their new acquisition Fiesta Henderson. A de-theming and re-theming ensued: Elephants were out, empanadas were in, and so it remains.
