Question of the Day - 06 February 2024

Boy, does this QoD remind us of how many questions we fielded about the Lady Luck over the years. For some reason, the old downtown casino, a block off the beaten path, captured a lot of imaginations while it was still in existence. 

In fact, the last time we answered one, way back in 2011, we started it off with, "Here we go again, covering the Lady Luck.

"QoD has never, in all its fabled history, received more questions about a single property than this downtown hotel-casino -- which isn’t even open for business. Does everyone really miss the joint so desperately? Or is it another instance of, in Joni Mitchell’s immortal lyrics, 'Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you got till it’s gone'? Or is the same reader sending the question from 50 different email addresses -- every week?"

Actually, we still mourn the LL ourselves -- to a certain extent, anyway. It was, without a doubt, one of Las Vegas’ great bargain and freebie casinos. We ate more prime rib specials, foot-long hot dogs, and cups of ice cream there than we care to recount. We made lots of free three-minute long-distance phone calls from the promotional phone booth. We took a few turns in the Whirlwind of Cash. We enjoyed comped dinners in the Burgundy Room. We saw lots of performances in the showroom. We even stayed there on occasion when the rooms were so cheap, we couldn't resist. (And then there were a couple of cocktail waitresses …)

As we recounted in the previous answer, Honest John's, which started out as a barber shop, became a full-time casino in 1968. It was operated by Andy Tompkins who, like Kirk Kerkorian and the Elardis, actively shunned the spotlight, granting very very few interviews in his lifetime (he died in 2002) and not even showing up for big events at his own joint, such as tower groundbreakings and topping-off ceremonies. But he was known in the community for being something of a Renaissance man, conversant on a variety subjects and equally at home with senators (he and Harry Reid were friends) and slot players. He was also a patron of the arts, making annual pilgrimages to Austria for Mozart festivals.

After graduating from the University of Georgia in 1954 with a bachelor's degree in psychology, Tompkins got into the hotel business in Atlantic City for a year before moving to Las Vegas and working his way up the ladder at a couple of downtown casinos before buying Honest John's in 1964. By 1968, he'd built it all the way up to six slot machines and renamed it Lady Luck. 

In 1972, Tompkins raised some capital, demolished the barber shop, and started a building spree to expand the LL casino. Ten years later, he bought an adjacent property and added the first 112 rooms. Four years after that in 1986, he built the 300-room East Tower and in 1989 the 388-room West Tower for a total of 800 rooms. 

He ran Lady Luck as a bargain downtown property for 10 more years, then sold it to Isle of Capri Casinos in 2000 for the princely sum of $14.5 million (today, that would barely renovate a Strip restaurant). That marked the beginning of the end for the out-of-the-way property.

Isle of Capri sold it off to a company called Steadfast AMX, a Newport Beach-based real-estate company about which nothing is remembered today, except that it turned two floors into timeshare units, complicating matters down the road. In 2005, Steadfast sold it to Henry Brent Company, majority owner of the Timbers Bar and Grill chain in southern Nevada, for $24 million. Brent announced a major renovation and expansion of the property to begin early in 2006. Lady Luck closed that year (except for the timeshares, which made things very awkward for the owners), with construction expected to last 9-12 months.

When the joint remained closed after the year was up, the questions started arriving at QoD's inbox -- and didn't stop for the next five years. 

Brent sold the hulk for $100 million to CIM Group, a commercial real estate agent in 2007. And there the Lady Luck sat for the next four years, until CIM was finally able to start the renovation, rebranding it the Downtown Grand, which opened in 2013.

It's interesting to note that the DTG has, to a large degree, circled around to the Lady Luck's bargain roots.