Reno's loss was the Las Vegas Strip's gain where the Thunderbird was concerned. Politician Cliff "Juice" Jones and contractor Marion Hicks (creator of the El Cortez) were outbid on a Reno hotel concession in 1946, so they turned their eyes southward. At the time, there were only two hotel-casinos on the Strip: the original El Rancho and the Last Frontier. (The Flamingo was still plagued with construction hiccups.) The two acquired 1,100 acres fronting both the Los Angeles Highway and Paradise Road.
Ground was broken in October 1947 for a building that was designed in a Southwestern motif, influenced both in its look and its name by Navajo culture. Decorated in earth tones, the hotel offered venues like the Wigwam Room. The main lobby boasted no fewer than three fireplaces, and the Thunderbird was the first Vegas casino to boast a porte-cochère, as well as the only bowling alley in Strip history.
Jones' and Hicks' three-winged hotel defied the arid climate by planting palm trees and a lawn, along with Nevada's largest swimming pool (36,000 gallons). The Thunderbird name was chosen to invoke its Navajo connotation as "the sacred bearer of happiness unlimited." The cocktail lounge was decorated in Western-themed murals and the showroom was distinguished by its heavy, wooden trusses. If anybody complained about the low ceilings, history has forgotten them.
The hotel was to become distinguished by its marquee, a giant, neon-adorned thunderbird that, according to the author of the ClassicLasVegas website, "at one time I'm told, also bellowed smoke. Unfortunately the upkeep and the need for natural gas to produce the smoke soon brought the majestic bird's days of smoking to an end."
The Thunderbird debuted on Labor Day of 1948 with 206 hotel rooms. A six-room bungalow unit would be added in 1950. During the opening-night gambling spree, competing hotel owners won so much in the casino that Jones and Hicks nearly had to surrender title to the hotel. A compromise was negotiated that left the original ownership in place, if undoubtedly chastened. To wit, they assembled a lengthy and "weathered" investor roster that included several local casino veterans.
Entertainment director Hal Braudis not only created 'tab' versions of popular Broadway shows, pioneering a Vegas trend, he also booked a starry roster of entertainers to play the showroom. Believe it or not, you could have dinner and then watch Harry Belafonte open for Rosemary Clooney's Vegas debut for the princely sum of four dollars. A subsequent fixture of the showroom, Nat King Cole, wasn't allowed to stay in the (segregated) hotel, so he slept in a trailer adjacent to the property. (The Thunderbird would also host Judy Garland's final Las Vegas performance, in 1965.) In addition to presenting a long series of ice shows, the Thunderbird would – in the early Seventies – host three annual editions of a gala called Latin Fire.
Dinner was spoiled the night that the Sons of the Pioneers played the Thunderbird and Rex Allen's horse Coco defecated all over the stage, proving the axiom that one should never work with children or animals. Thanks to Jones' political connections, the Las Vegas Press Club held its annual "Branding Iron" roasts at the Thunderbird. (Sen. Pat McCarran was a frequent presence at the Thunderbird, as were power players Howard Hughes and Wilbur Clark.) In 1954, the Terrace Room was built, a venue that could serve both as a cinema and a dance floor.
Trouble reared its head in 1955, when Jones and Hicks were accused by the Nevada Tax Commission of making payoffs to Meyer Lansky and two associates. In a case that went all the way to the Nevada Supreme Court, the two owners were eventually exonerated. That same year, Jones and Hicks added a second floor to the casino and built a new porte-cochère. The Paradise Road acreage became home to a horseracing track, Thunderbird Downs. One of the freakier enhancements of the Thunderbird was a semi-nude icecapade, long-running Ecstasy on Ice, which got the resort on the cover of Time Magazine.
The Thunderbird was sold to Del Webb in 1964, who subleased it to hotelier Herbert Lodge (Hicks had died three years earlier). The next year the casino's frontage was redone again, including a gargantuan billboard, 700 feet long and studded with 37,000 light bulbs as well as – believe it or not – eight miles of neon. With expenditures like that, it's no wonder that the Thunderbird couldn't keep up on its mortgage payments, leading Webb to reclaim title to the casino in 1967.
Five years later, Caesars World purchased the Thunderbird, intending to tear it down in favor of a $150 million, 2,000-room hotel, the Marc Anthony. Obviously, this grand ambition never came to pass and Caesars sold the Thunderbird to banker Parry Thomas at a $5.7 million loss. In 1977, Thomas flipped the hotel to turnaround expert Major Riddle, who also owned the Dunes. Riddle changed its name to the Silverbird. Unfortunately, a 400-room hotel-casino wasn't a viable proposition and Riddle disposed of the Silverbird to Aladdin Hotel & Casino owner Ed Torres – despite the latter's ties to organized crime -- for half a million dollars.
Having picked up the casino for a song, Torres proceeded to add a 600-room hotel tower, plus yet another new porte-cochère, this time in Spanish-mission style, and re-branded the property as the El Rancho. A second expansion was executed in 1987. However, the El Rancho could no longer keep up with the times. It closed on July 6, 1992. This marked the beginning of a bizarre saga in which Las Vegas Entertainment attempted to redevelop the site as a Country-and-Western-themed resort (a saga that was recently covered by QoD and which you can find in the archives).
The new owners, unable to realize their plans for the site, were eventually done in by a KVBC-TV report that found the El Rancho rife with rats, bugs, and exposed asbestos. A slew of local and OSHA fines were the result. Eventually Turnberry Properties acquired the site and, in October 2000, the El Rancho was imploded. Turnberry planned to use the site for a gargantuan casino resort, Fontainebleau. Its footprint was so large that it also consumed the Thunderbird's overflow property, the Algiers Hotel, built in 1953 and demolished in 2005.
However, Turnberry badly understimated the cost of Fontainebleau, which was abandoned in a half-completed state, still at least $1.3 billion short of the amount needed to finish it. Carl Icahn bought the property out of bankruptcy and is currently shopping it around in hopes that someone will either finish what Turnberry started or cannibalize the tower for its structural steel. It's a sad twist of fate that one of the Strip's earliest landmarks – the Thunderbird – has given way to its largest eyesore.
