The camels outside the Sahara had a long and checkered history, including some complete body changes, not to mention numerous moves, and more than one paint job. They rubbed shoulders (muzzles, and humps) with some of the days' biggest celebrities before meeting what was the common fate of much of Vegas' past until the Neon Museum came along -- anachronisms discarded in a landfill somewhere.
What debuted in 1947 as Club Bingo, which in 1952 was reborn as the Sahara, with a North-African theme. Adorned with spear-wielding models of warriors and with venues named the Congo Room, Casbah Lounge, and Caravan Room, the theming continued outside with a nomadic caravan, including camels, placed out front on the lawn. (Also, see photographs #22 and #62 in the extensive slideshow we link to below).
As time went on and the Strip blossomed into its classic phase as an elegantly kitsch neon playground, the Sahara grew with it, adding hotel towers and its iconic illuminated minaret-inspired porte-cochere (scroll backward to see photos #127 and #130, and forward to #4). At what the camels received their upgrade, we're not sure -- it was still the originals posing with Marquerite Piazza in August, 1956 (slide 21) and they're still there goofing around with Sam Melchionne and his band in September, 1964.
At some point, however, it looks like the camel train got both an upgrade and a down-sizing: From #122 you can see that there are now only two camels, with different rider/leader, and a multi-colored paint job which was repeated from time to time, plus their location by 1992 was not quite as front-and-center as it had been when the caravan debuted...
Fast forward to 2008, and we came across an online review of the hotel, posted on June 12, 2008, in which the writer complained that her only complaint about the stay was how the powers that be "had removed the camel statue after the first night I was there." The timing is corroborated by others and new owners SBE Entertainment had already been given the greenlight the previous February to completely remodel the old dame (see Today's News); the closure of the two hotel towers and the buffet came the following year, followed by the iconic Congo Room in March 2010.
On May 16, 2011, the casino doors shuttered for good at the Sahara. The closure was followed by what amounted to a protracted house-clearance sale that saw every last fixture and fitting, swizzle stick and barstool, crap table and camel sold. As Donald Hayes, president of National Content Liquidators, the company in charge of the sale put it most poetically when we spoke with him in the course of answering this question, "When it was done, there was nothing left in there but an echo."
And this is where things get a little weird, because we then asked him about the outdoor camels, and he confirmed -- as we had suspected and now know -- that they had already departed years before, although we saw the same article as you that had suggested they were not only still there, but had carried a hefty price tag. He said the only camel statue was one in a glass case that had been residing inside, off the casino, and which sold for $5,800.
All we can think of is that there was that some mis-reporting or a typo that crept in at some point. Maybe someone remembered the camels and perhaps became confused with the most popular items in that sale, which turned out to be the hotel's lamps, with their camel bases, all 700 of which were gone after the first weekend of what, at two months, turned out to be the longest such sale in Las Vegas' history. But like Friday's animatronic duo at the Luxor, we fear these historic dromedaries are most likely now pushing up daisies in a landfill.
HERE'S WHERE TO CHECK OUT THAT NUMBERED SLIDESHOW OF PHOTOGRAPHS CHARTING THE HISTORY OF THE SAHARA, COURTESY OF VARIOUS NEWS AGENCIES AROUND TOWN, INCLUDING THE NEWS BUREAU AND LAS VEGAS SUN.
