Question of the Day - 16 April 2022

Thomas Hull, from southern California, owned a chain of El Rancho motor inns. On a visit to Las Vegas in 1940, Hull met with a number of civic leaders, who convinced him to open a franchise. There's some discrepancy over how much Hull paid for the 57 acres he purchased; we've seen $5,700 and $57,000. Considering that 5,000 acres to the south and west of the El Rancho Vegas site sold a year later for $1 per acre, it seems more likely that Hull paid $100 per and not $1,000. 

The grand opening of the El Rancho Vegas took place on April 3, 1941. The 65-room bungalow-style motor inn, on the southwest corner of Highway 91 (now the Strip) and San Francisco Avenue (now Sahara), came complete with a casino, steakhouse, showroom, barbershop, health club, western clothing store, palm tress, lawns, and a large swimming pool right next to the highway to entice road-weary families. It was also air-conditioned. And Hull gave the local radio-station operator free rent in exchange for moving his studio and tower to the resort, plus promos every half-hour: “Broadcasting from the grounds of the fabulous El Rancho Vegas.” 

Just beyond the city line, the El Rancho Vegas attracted the traffic coming in from southern California, as well as locals escaping the claustrophobia of Fremont Street. Business boomed from the beginning and Hull quickly doubled the number of rooms.

In one bold move, Hull actually revolutionized Las Vegas development. By building in an unincorporated area of Clark County, he avoided the higher city taxes on property and gambling revenues, as well as the control of the powerful downtown casino operators (all of whom, according to contemporary accounts, believed that it wouldn't last a year). Less stringent building codes reduced the cost of construction and the wide-open desert permitted ease of accessibility and plentiful parking for motorists, unavailable in the congested city core.

In fact, this "motor-hotel" triggered the transition from a town organized around and dependent on the railroad to one better served by cars and trucks. It also coincided with an overall suburbanization of America in the 1940s, specifically Los Angeles's spreading low-rise sprawl. When the El Rancho Vegas opened in 1941, thanks to Highway 91, Las Vegas was a mere seven hours by car from L.A. 

Management difficulties prompted the joint to be sold several times. It burned to the ground in a spectacular fire in 1960 that consumed nearly the entire casino and adjoining buildings within the first 20 minutes, with flames shooting 100 feet in the air. The cause of the fire was never determined, though plenty of rumors circulated at the time and since.

Those included widely held suspicions that the arsonist was Marshall Caifano, the Chicago Outfit's Las Vegas enforcer in those days. Apparently, just a day earlier, Caifano was in the casino, trying to strong-arm the bosses for a large dinner comp and a room he could use when he bullied a showgirl or two into a one-night stand. For the first time, the casino manager told Caifano to take his business elsewhere. Caifano was decidedly vocal about his displeasure, threatening everyone and everything in sight. 

All that said, fire department officials claimed that they didn't find any accelerants in the ashes, even though the casino went up so quickly. Even so, Caifano was placed in the brand new Black Book, the first name to earn the dubious distinction. With Caifano now a persona non grata in the casinos, Chicago installed their new enforcer, Tony "the Ant" Spilotro.   

The El Rancho site, across the Strip from the Sahara, has still yet to be developed more than 60 years later. The Las Vegas Festival Grounds now occupies 26 acres on that corner; it's owned by Phil Ruffin, who picked up the property from MGM Resorts when he bought Circus Circus in 2019.