Question of the Day - 20 May 2022

[Editor's Note: This question came off our recent QoD about Lake Las Vegas itself -- when and how it was developed. This one is written by our Stiffs & Georges business blogger David McKee.]

The idea for a just-add-water resort community on the edge of Henderson dates back to 1967, when J. Carlton Adair wanted to create a Lake Adair on U.S. government-owned land out near the Las Vegas Wash. The acreage didn’t change hands for another 20 years, Adair having gone bankrupt and losing the rights to Ronald Boeddeker, who flipped the site to Transcontinental Corp. in 1990. Development didn’t begin in earnest for another five years, sparked by the arrival of former Caesars World CEO Henry Gluck as co-chairman of Transcontinental. Texas billionaires Sid and Lee Bass were recruited to co-finance the exclusive community-to-be.

Gluck, Bass, and Bass pile-drove Lake Las Vegas into bankruptcy by mid-2008, leaving unpaid debts to the tune of at least $500 million, perhaps double that amount. It took another four years to get the project out of Chapter 11 and an extra $30 million to put on the final touches.

The enclave is now best known today for being home to Celine Dion, who lives in one of the many mansions that cover the formerly barren hillsides around the reservoir.

In the end, Lake Las Vegas succeeded perhaps beyond its wildest dreams as a hideaway for the affluent. However, it has had to work overtime to get the Average Joe to come visit, partly due to its perception of exclusivity, but in large part because it is nearly 20 miles from the Strip and accessible only by a long, winding, and narrow road, which wraps around the golf courses that are the community’s raison d’être. Its future would appear to be more of the same.

As far as what was done well and what wasn’t, there was more of the latter than the former. Lake Las Vegas gained notoriety for the paltriness of its retail offerings, mainly upscale knickknack stores rather than places that offered the essentials. For those, you have to get in your car and make a long drive. And it has been a dismal failure as a gambling venue. Casino MonteLago has long been closed and other gaming (if there still is any; we haven't checked lately) has been confined to slot routes. 

What will future historians make of Lake Las Vegas? It’s hard to say, but it preserves in amber a period of easy wealth in Sin City. Its proliferation of Mediterranean architecture will be judged as either strangely anachronistic or a time when it was thought that people came to Las Vegas in order to get away from it. It’s become such a biosphere unto itself that, frankly, no one thinks of Lake Las Vegas much anymore and talks about it still less.