Your wife sure knows her Las Vegas history. From 1977-80, it was the Holiday International Hotel & Casino. Then it became The Park – and stopped offering five-cent beer -- until 1986, when entrepreneur Bob Snow bought it, hoping to recreate the successful formula of his Church Street Station mall in Orlando, Florida … which included reviving those nickel brews.
The hotel was redone in a Barbary Coast style that Frommer’s describes as follows: "The overall look here, typical of Downtown, is early-20th-century San Francisco. However, unlike everywhere else, the details here are outstanding, resulting in a beautiful hotel by any measure. Outside, gas lamps flicker on wrought-iron railings and stained-glass windows. Inside, you’ll find hammered-tin ceilings, ornate chandeliers, period antiques and artwork, and lazy ceiling fans. It’s all very appealing and just plain pretty."
Snow extended the hotel with a 1991 mall that still preserves Theodore Roosevelt’s Pullman car, the Kuwait Royal Bank’s bronze doors, and a chandelier from a Parisian opera house. Perhaps Main Street Station’s greatest claim to notoriety is the section of the Berlin Wall on which urinals in the mens’ room are mounted. "It’s safe to speculate on what political messages Mr. Snow was trying to send," laughs Boyd Gaming spokesman David Strow.
Main Street Station was, however, located too far from Fremont Street and Snow’s fortunes withered accordingly. The property closed in 1992 and Boyd purchased it out of bankruptcy the following year, for $16 million. Boyd added a pedestrian bridge to the California Hotel and, from 1994 through 1996, used Main Street Station as an overflow hotel when business was good (but kept the casino floor closed), officially reopening it in its present form in late ’96. Although some renovations had been made to the property in the interim, Strow says that few decorative changes were affected and the "incorporation of antiques and antiquities is a holdover from Bob Snow’s original design."
Although Main Street Station struggled as a standalone hotel-casino, it has flourished under the Boyd umbrella. So, the next time you’re in town, head on over to experience one of the more unusual attempts to diversify Las Vegas’ tourist appeal.
[As to the "history of the Maxim Casino" QoD, which has tantalizingly been slated to run for a week or more, both it and its would-be author have been the victims of a confluence of factors that continue to thwart best intentions, but none of these has involved us being silenced by old-time gangsters, at least not to-date... Rather, an initial surprising dearth of information then spurred some lateral thinking and digging around in various nooks and crannies that in turn led to some new tangential avenues of investigation, of varying degrees of fruitfulness.
Add to this the welcome, but delayed interjections of various Vegas veterans, who've kindly contributed some personal hands-on recollections of the joint as schedules (theirs and ours) have permitted, and we've found ourselves accumulating an interesting and eclectic, if far from comprehensive array of information that now needs to be woven into some kind of coherent and chronological whole. While we're still honing, by the way, feel free to send in any personal anecdotes or memories of your own that might gild this particular lily -- we're happy to include anything that adds to the patchy picture and we'll continue to add additional feedback as "Updates" after the fact, if something you read stimulates an afterthought.
Because of all these factors, not only has the answer grown, but in the course of being researched it has asexually reproduced itself and now comprises (or will do, in due course) two related but entirely stand-alone answers, straddling different eras and locations.
Throw into this mix the interjection of the monthly newsletter and its research demands, some unexpected staff absences, and random occurrences like the huge breaking news regarding the sale of the Mirage, or the current writer having been rendered homeless by a massive house flood, and there just haven't been enough hours in the day to tie all the loose ends together to our satisfaction. But bear with us and you will get the answer you've been waiting for sometime very soon -- we just hope after all this time that it lives up to the ever-mounting expectations for which we have no one but ourselves to blame! We haven't forgotten that we still "owe" you at least one more episode in our epic odyssey of historic Strip attractions of yesteryear. All in due course, dear readers...]
