In two of three cases, the answer, sadly, is "no." In the case of the Flamingo, when our Stiffs & Georges columnist David McKee came to Las Vegas in 1999, a Flamingo employee told him that then-owner Hilton Gaming had just torn down a bungalow that was the last vestige of the Bugsy Siegel era. The Flamingo was begun by Los Angeles nightclub owner Billy Wilkerson, whose vision for the property was remarkably prescient of the present-day Las Vegas casino: spa, fine dining, golf and upscale rooms.
Trouble was, Wilkerson tried to achieve his visionary concept during World War II, a time when material costs were at a premium. Enter Siegel and associates, who ponied up the capital to finish the project. In an unwittingly prophetic moment, Siegel told general contractor Del Webb – who witnessed some furious arguments at the construction sites – "Don’t worry; we only kill each other." Trouble was, the Flamingo had been completed at the then-astronomical cost of $6 million, was a bust financially and its empty coffers appeared to have been further drained by a Siegel skimming operation. The still-incomplete Flamingo was temporarily closed in January 1947 (it opened a few months later) and Siegel was assassinated that June.
The original porte-cochere and marquee were redone in, 1953, leading to the "Champagne Tower," a marquee covered in neon "bubbles." In 1967, Kirk Kerkorian bought the Flamingo from a trio of mobbed-up businessmen and set about remaking the Flamingo in his image (see link for a picture of the handshake that sealed the deal, in front of that famous tower). The last vestiges of the original hotel were demolished, a new tower was added and so was the famous garden, with its koi ponds and Chilean flamingos. Kerkorian flipped the property to Hilton Corp. two years later, and between 1975 and 1995 it would grow to its present four towers. A Hilton Grand Vacations timeshare was added out back, in 1993. The Flamingo was purchased by Caesars Entertainment in 2005 but, aside from some room upgrades, Caesars has let the property be.
Also completely gone is the Sahara. It had a long-since-eradicated predecessor on the site, Milton Prell’s Club Bingo (see QoD 9/18/2005 for more background). But the Bingo went bust in 1950. However, Prell had a brainwave (add hotel rooms) and persuaded the Desert Inn’s A. Pollard Simon into investing in a new casino, to be called the Sahara. Del Webb got the general-contracting deal in return for a 20 percent stake in the Sahara. The original design by Max Maltzmann included a casino, showroom, and two v-shaped, low-rise bungalow wings and was inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s Arizona Biltmore hotel, in Phoenix (see QoD 6/4/2015).
In 1961, full ownership of the Sahara passed to Webb, who outdid himself by adding a second, 24-story hotel tower (the first had been built in 1959), the tallest in Las Vegas, built on the site formerly occupied by the eastern bungalow wing. A third tower would be added in 1979, a fourth in 1987. Penultimate owner Bill Bennett also stuck the NASCAR café and a rollercoaster onto the north side of the property.
The remaining bungalow rooms eventually were demolished to make way for a minaret-topped porte-cochere and a parking garage. As for the remainder of the Sahara, a remake of the lobby, a 1964 fire, and the 1967 addition of a convention center made it no longer recognizable as Maltzmann’s original vision. So, by the time that owner Sam Nazarian closed the Sahara, tore out the casino, and gutted the House of Lords restaurant in 2012, it could be argued that the Sahara had lacked any vestige of its original self for quite a few years.
The Tropicana opened in April 1957, with 300 rooms, causing the Las Vegas Sun to rhapsodize about the "lush, tropical beauty to its desert site about one mile north of the airport on the Los Angeles highway." The design was not unlike that of the Sahara: a central casino, from which two V-shaped bungalow wings spread forth, flanking a central swimming pool, which would grow over the years and become the Trop’s signature attraction.
However, Guarantee Reserve Life Insurance owner Ben Jaffe (who was also chairman of Miami’s Fontainebleu Hotel) was unfortunate in his timing when he chose to enter the Strip-resort race in the mid-1950s. Most of the local construction labor was tied up in the Stardust, and Jaffe wound up having to liquidate his Guarantee Reserve and Fontainebleu holdings to cover the cost of building the Tropicana.
Jaffe ran into more trouble after he sublet the gambling concession to "Dandy" Phil Kastel. The latter’s high profile and ties to Mob boss Frank Costello were too much for the Nevada Gaming Control Board to overlook and he was denied a license. Even with the more acceptable Louis Lederer at the helm, the skim at the Tropicana was known within a month of its 1957 opening, when a sheet of paper detailing the scam was found on a wounded Costello after an attempted Mob hit. Lederer was ousted, replaced by Kell Houssels and Robert Cannon.
Kell Houssels parlayed an initial 6 percent stake in the casino into majority ownership, buying out Jaffe in 1959. That same year, he and entertainment director Lou Walters had the brainstorm of importing the Folies Bergere. It ran until 1959, when then-CEO Scott Butera made the short-sighted decision to terminate it, causing the showroom to become home to a revolving door of short-lived acts.
By 1964, two more low-rise wings had been added to the Trop. The lounge was also redone as the Blue Room and became the city’s leading jazz venue. (Siegfried & Roy got their start at the Trop in 1967.) Houssels sold the Trop to Trans-Texas Airways in 1968, although the airline kept him on as general manager until 1970. Soon afterward, Trans-Texas entered negotiations with Deil Gustafson, a Minnesota banker, and the Trop changed hands again in 1972.
Gustafson, however, was loaning money to the Detroit mob through a holding company and, when the Nevada Gaming Control Board got wind of this, he was forced to relinquish majority ownership. Chemical heiress Mitzi Stauffer Briggs bought in and was responsible for the building of the first of the Trop’s two towers, the Tiffany Tower. (The Island Tower would be added in 1986.) Briggs, incidentally, would be bankrupted when a lack of business savvy and the discovery of a Mob skim at the casino cost her ownership of the Trop. She became the sacristan of Guardian Angel Cathedral.
Alas, the only remaining vestige of the original, Y-shaped layout is a bungalow wing, the so-called ‘5000’ wing, where some of the old motel rooms do duty as offices. Like the Trop’s barrel-vaulted Tiffany-style glass casino ceiling (which was not part of the original design, these rooms are frequently mentioned for potential demolition, so see them while you still can.
Ramada Inns took over the Trop in 1979 and made a raft of additional changes to the property (including the installation of that barrel-vault ceiling), then spun off its casinos to Aztar Corp. in 1989. Aztar would spend almost two decades agonizing over whether to further revamp the Trop or not. In 2011, new owner Onex Corp. redid all of the hotel rooms, revamped the lobby in a ‘South Beach’ motif (heavy on the white), replaced the marquee, and demolished a wing of motel rooms.
Last year, Onex flipped the property to Penn National Gaming, which plans some kind of capital improvement, to be announced later this year, but has been chary with indications as to what that will entail. Since the renovation has already been budgeted at only $200 million, we do not anticipate that Penn will – as it has hinted – build a third hotel tower, but it may well gut some of the existing interiors to make room for new restaurants and retail. And when that happens, the last portion of the original Trop may be gone, too.
