What you saw -- on Flamingo Road, one major artery north of where you recalled -- were some of the last vestiges of the Bourbon Street casino-hotel, which was built in 1980 and imploded in the wee hours of Feb. 14, 2006, after being purchased and shut down by Harrah’s Entertainment. The embossing of the names of famous jazz musicians like Jack Teagarden, Art Tatum, Al Hirt and Pete Fountain onto the sidewalk obviously dovetailed with Bourbon Street’s nominal "Big Easy" theme, though it did look odd to come across them once the casino was gone, as you discovered.
Bourbon Street’s brief history was plagued by revolving-door ownership, including a sojourn under the Starwood flag. Entertainment acts also experienced a high mortality rate there. (One online critique, circa 2003, summarized the offerings as "freak shows/hypnotists.")
Bourbon Street actually began life as the Shenandoah, with an original investment group that included Mr. Vegas himself, Wayne Newton. It was unable to open its casino, however, and by 1984 the hotel was in Chapter 11, reopening as Bourbon Street the next year. This gave Bourbon Street perhaps its sole claim on the history books, as it was the first Vegas casino licensed under foreign (Canadian, in this case) ownership. The casino closed again in September 1996, reopening the following year.
Flipped like a flapjack, Bourbon Street changed hands eight times between 1995 and 2005, culminating in a $61 million purchase by Harrah’s Entertainment. By this point, Bourbon Street’s casino had become a glorified slot route, farmed out to United Coin Machine, while Harrah’s ran the non-gaming portions of the property, including its 166-room hotel.
"It was not in the best of shape," concedes a former Harrah’s executive. "It wasn’t falling apart, but it had passed its prime." During the post-Hurricane Katrina diaspora, "Bourbon Street ended up becoming a temporary shelter for a couple hundred employees from the Gulf Coast," while they looked for work here, the exec recalls. "As its last act, it got to serve as a place for people trying to make their way out of New Orleans" – who ended up at a hotel called Bourbon Street.
Although the company originally intended to keep the property open through Oct. 31, 2005, a broken water main forced the issue and it closed its doors permanently on Oct. 18. The actual implosion was a challenge, says the ex-Harrah’s exec, because of the way Bourbon Street "was kind of shoehorned in on Flamingo Road." This meant a dearth of good vantage points, and the viewing party was held on the top floors of Bally’s Las Vegas -- probably one of the few times people have been able to look almost straight down on a casino implosion.
Initially, the former Bourbon Street site was to become part of a Harrah’s metaresort that ran from the south edge of the Sands Expo Center to the north side of Harmon Avenue. In her book, Winner Takes All, author Christina Binkley describes an early version of the project as a 10-year, $13 billion, 10-hotel development, aligned around a grand boulevard and called Epicentre. Even before Harrah’s demolished Bourbon Street, then-CFO Charles Atwood floated the idea of using the site for a pedestrian bridge that would connect Bally’s Las Vegas with the Flamingo.
However, a 2008 leveraged buyout of the company hamstrung it financially and the grand scheme was scaled down to reinventions of Bill’s Gamblin’ Hall & Saloon and Imperial Palace as The Cromwell and The Linq, respectively. Throw in a pedestrian mall of shops and restaurants, and an ill-placed observation wheel (the Vegas High Roller) and that was the ultimate realization of those once-grandiose plans. And the Bourbon Street site remained empty.
Following the 1996 implosion, the southwest corner of the Bourbon Street site became a popular hangout for street people. Harrah’s – now Caesars Entertainment -- has since adopted a proactive stance toward keeping the site clean, and has even taken down the fencing that used to surround it. The company also managed to turn a few dollars off of Bourbon Street after the implosion, renting out the land as a staging area for construction materials.
Anyway, as you’ve noticed, Bourbon Street is forgotten before it was entirely gone. In fact, for years it still showed up on some tourist maps, like a ghost haunting the corner of Flamingo Road and Audrie Lane, although its diminutive and incongruous roadside jazz tribute is long gone (we could find no trace even on Google Images).
