Yes, he most certainly did covet the cathedral, which sits on seven acres at 302 Cathedral Way and the Strip. According to the Los Angeles Times, when Wynn was designing his eponymous Las Vegas property, prior to Encore, he "approached church leaders offering to buy the land and build a new cathedral and office building elsewhere. He wanted to raze the structures and replace them with a parking garage."
Considering that Guardian Angel Cathedral, built in 1963, is the grandest remaining local edifice of pioneering African-American architect Paul Revere Williams, some would consider demolishing it tantamount to an insult to Vegas’ history. (Williams also designed the Space Age control tower at Los Angeles International Airport, and Las Vegas' La Concha Motel lobby, now reconstituted downtown as the visitor center for the Neon Museum.) Its Stations of the Cross are adorned with beautiful and iconoclastic stained-glass windows, one of which reference secular Las Vegas icons, including the atom symbol, a harlequin, and the Landmark, Las Vegas Hilton, Sands, and Stardust hotel-casinos, which helped to finance the structure (see QoD 6/23/11 in the Archives).
Wynn recalled that the monsignor of the cathedral "said it would be a big hassle," one so enormous, in fact, that it required papal approval. Wynn even sent an emissary (apparently political fixer Sig Rogich) to the Vatican to plead his case. Then-rector Lawrence Lentz noted that, since the cathedral is upon consecrated ground, it was hardly likely it would be sold to facilitate gambling. "I think that’s one of the reasons that it’s so important to the bishop that we maintain ourselves here amid everything else on the Strip," he told the LAT, "to be that sign, to be that haven, that oasis -- amid all of this cacophony."
Wynn has been a good sport about the whole thing, noting that the parking garage wound up much closer to the casino, having been built on the old Desert Inn site when the cathedral lot proved to be unobtainable.
"Through the years, several inquiries have come … none of which have gone down the road too far," adds Vicar Robert Stoeckig, who goes by the informal "Father Bob" and who estimates that there have been six or seven approaches over the decades. "Most often they come from brokers or people who control neighboring parcels who are trying to aggregate land for development, so I frequently don’t know what corporation is behind them, since they don’t get to that stage. They are not all about the cathedral, sometimes they are about some of the land around the cathedral. We would have to have [in return] a church equally accessible to the tourist population," of comparable size and parking capacity. "Someone else would have to provide that," explains Father Bob, and the new cathedral would have to be up and running before Guardian Angel could be vacated. "There’s no place like that" on the Strip, "to put the people who want to come to church. Churches are unique things to replace. It’s not like tearing down a small hotel to build a bigger casino.
"When you look at the number of people who walk down the Strip to Guardian Angel Cathedral, it’s pretty good," so much so that the cathedral has to schedule three Saturday services and five on Sundays. It's got an interesting history, as you can tell by seeing who donated some of the stained-glass windows. 12 in number, they are the work of Hungarian artist Isabel Piczek. One of them, Stoeckig points out, was donated by Danny Thomas and his wife.
Ironically, Guardian Angel was originally built to serve the casino industry, as a place of worship for those workers who couldn’t attend regular Sunday mass, usually because they were on shift. Morris "Moe" Dalitz donated the land, purportedly bought out of his own pocket, and hired Williams to design a shrine. (Guardian Angel was not originally conceived as a cathedral; the seat of the diocese was in Reno until 1995.)
"As the growth began, in the Seventies and Eighties, Guardian Angel Cathedral outgrew its walls," resumes Father Bob. This led to the construction of the Shrine of the Most Holy Redeemer, immediately south of the Tropicana (which has also been the subject of its own QoD -- see 6/25/05 in the Archives. Its addition now gives tourists the option to worship at the south end of the Strip, or at its center. This is the bottom line for the diocese and the reason that negotiations about uprooting the parish have always been short-lived: To provide out-of-towners with a readily accessible place of worship, not forcing them to go searching off-Strip someplace, is the principal raison d'être for both buildings and relocating them while remaining in compliance with this concept would be difficult today.
As of this writing, the going rate for Strip land is $8 million an acre. At those prices, it is unlikely that anyone is going to bundle up sufficient land to swap it with Guardian Angel Cathedral or the Shrine of the Most Holy Redeemer, especially when there’s so much money to be made from commercial use (whereby shopping malls seem to be the new casinos). The upside of this is that we have faith that the beautiful and historic cathedral will be with us for some time.
