Since you did a recent walk down memory lane discussing the Westward Ho, etc., what about the neighbor I remember, the Castaways? Seemed like a cool place during my first few trips to Las Vegas.
Happy to.
The Castaways was located at 3320 Las Vegas Blvd. S., on a portion of the land that the Mirage now occupies (the northernmost corner). It was originally a little motel called Mountain View, then was renamed the Sans Souci (French for "Without Worry"), and developed into a full-fledged hotel-casino of the same name by the mid-1950s.
The Sans Souci opened, closed, reopened, and closed over the next several years.
Finally, after he opened the Tropicana in 1958, Miami hotelier Ben Jaffe, who was involved in the original Fontainebleau and had deep Mob connections in New York and New Orleans, bought the Sans Souci, renamed it the Castaways (after a Miami Beach motel he'd earlier opened), and imbued it with a Polynesian theme. But Jaffe had no more luck in owning it than the succession of Sans Souci proprietors and the Castaways closed and reopened a few times until he sold the whole schmear for $3.3 million to none other than Howard Hughes on his buying spree in late 1967, Hughes' third hotel-casino acquisition (after the Desert Inn and Sands).
The Hughes Tool Company operated the Castaways for the next nearly 10 years. It was a minor property in the portfolio, with less than a dozen table games and barely 150 slot machines. Hughes Tool did, however, expand the showroom, where we recall the musical comedy Bottoms Up played for a while and Redd Foxx headlined from time to time. Hughes also invested another couple of million in an effort to bring the old place up to 1980s' standards, such as they were in those days of stale old Vegas.
We also recall that there was a four-story temple behind the casino based on Jainism, one of the world's oldest religions (from India). It was renamed the Gateway of Luck and was as anomalous at the Castaways as the oversized $500 and $1,000 sports book chips that, reportedly, had no value, but were given away as drawing prizes, presumably as collector items.
Anyway, Steve Wynn bought the Castaways, along with a vacant lot next door, in late 1986 for $50 million to make way for his mammoth investment on the Strip, which of course turned into the Mirage. Apparently, he bought it out from under Donald Trump, who had low-balled his offer; when Wynn came in with fair-market value at the time, he got the deal in a leaseback arrangement with what by then was known as Summa Corporation.
Wynn closed the property in mid-1987 and gave away a lot of the accoutrements as souvenirs, from ashtrays and used carpeting to a 100-foot sign.
In a side note, the original Showboat out on Boulder Highway, which opened in 1956, was renamed Castaways in 2001, partly in honor of the old Strip casino and partly because the seller, Harrah's Entertainment, kept the name to avoid confusion with its Showboat Hotel-Casino in Atlantic City. The new Castaways didn't last long, shutting down for good a few years later.
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