Question of the Day - 23 August 2025

Yesterday we chronicled the founding of State Line (later Primm) and its growth into an improbable gambling destination. Today, we chart its rise and fall as a casino settlement.

A few years after tripling down on State Line, Gary Primm took a flier into Las Vegas casino development. He was the progenitor of New York-New York, now owned by MGM Resorts International. 

In addition to buying Primm out of his share of New York-New York, MGM also relieved him of the three border casinos in 1998. MGM built 52 affordable-housing units for employees and generally tried to run the three casinos as farm teams for the big-league casinos in Las Vegas. But after less than a decade, MGM tired of the Primm experiment and sold the trio of properties to the Herbst family. The latter hugely overpaid for MGM’s rural assets and it was the Herbsts’ undoing as gambling operators. The gambling houses were regrouped under Affinity Gaming, which operates what’s left of them today.

Aside from the casinos, the lone aspect of Primm discernible from the highway is an all-but-empty outlet mall. The mall went through numerous ownership changes until the lenders foreclosed in 2018. It was bought in 2021 for $400,000, but even that wasn't much of a deal. At last count, one lonely vendor remains.

Virtually the only vestige of life is on the California side of the border, where Affinity’s Lotto Store does a brisk trade in Golden State and interstate lottery tickets. Living in a state too beholden to casinos to establish a lottery, Nevadans have no choice but to cross the California line to spend their money for a shot at a dream.

This writer has stayed at all three Primm casino-hotels during their Affinity years. The Great Recession brought them a windfall in the form of furniture and other appurtenances originally bought for Fontainebleau. These were resold by Carl Icahn to various small casinos, earning Fontainebleau the nickname “Uncle Carl’s Carpet Barn.” The luxurious furnishings made an odd contrast to Affinity’s pinchpenny methods, which included rationing ice per room.

In addition to being the oldest of the threesome, Whiskey Pete’s was easily the dustiest, dowdy beyond its years. Consequently, it was the first to close, at the end of 2024, followed a few months later by the mid-market and comparably mediocre Buffalo Bill’s. Bill's will supposedly be opened up on special occasions, but those are few and far between in Primm.

With the local economy hanging by a thread, the future for Primm is inarguably bleak. Perhaps Affinity can limp along with one state-line casino. Perhaps the Brightline train project will bring rail service to the border. And perhaps motorists will rediscover the once-busy hamlet.

But that’s a lot of perhapses. In the meantime, we ask this: Would the last person leaving Primm please turn out the lights?