Question of the Day - 24 October 2022

The Sahara opened on October 7, 1952, having taken over the location of the five-year-old Club Bingo and debuting with 240 rooms at a cost of $5.5 million. It was the seventh casino on the nascent Strip, joining the El Rancho Vegas, directly across Highway 91, which was slowly coming to be known as the Las Vegas Strip, the Flamingo, Thunderbird, Last Frontier, Desert Inn, and Sands. 

The theme, like that of the DI and Sands, was emblematic of the southern Nevada ecology, but it evoked the North African desert instead, starting with its name. Of course, in those days, the theming tended to be cheesy, with plaster camels and riders forming a nomadic caravan on the front lawn and more camels and miscellaneous Arabs lounging around the interior, not to mention the life-size models of African warriors, spears in hand, flanking the entrance to the famed Congo showroom, along with the Caravan coffee shop and Casbar lounge. The Strip sign was 100 feet tall and the swimming pool was Olympic-size.

Aside from these ethnic embellishments, the exotic font used for the hotel logo, the "eastern" styling of venues like the House of Lords and Don the Beachcomber restaurants, and the plants and murals that bestowed a lush "desert oasis" feel on the showroom, the Sahara was basically just another two-story chip off the same Googie-style block as the Thunderbird and Desert Inn.

The Sahara really wanted to be known for Hollywood glitz. "Our goal is now to make the name 'Hotel Sahara' synonymous with everything that is unsurpassed in the finest hotel luxury," stated owner/builder Milton Prell, and his property soon became the top celebrity hangout, with hotel guests who included Sinatra, Steve Allen, Elvis, and even the Beatles. The Sahara, with acts like Louie Prima, Keely Smith, and Sam Butera and the Witnesses, is credited with revolutionizing the Las Vegas lounge scene in the mid-1950s. The Casbar Lounge was the swingingest place in town and everyone from Frank Sinatra to Judy Garland was in the audience for the non-stop party.

The Sahara expanded a couple of times in the '50s, once with a $600,000 loan from the bank of Las Vegas, led by E. Parry Thomas and Jerry Mack; it was their first loan to a casino. Then the investors in the Sahara, including Prell and Sam Boyd, built the Mint downtown in 1956 and packaged the Sahara and Mint into a two-casino sale to Del Webb in 1961. 

In 1964, the Sahara's entertainment director, Stan Irwin, booked the Beatles for two shows across the road at the Convention Center; they performed for 8,500 Las Vegans at $4 a ticket.

Two years later, a 14-story 200-room tower was added; in 1968, a 24-story 400-room tower was tacked on. 

Paul Lowden bought the Sahara from Del Webb in 1982 for $50 million. Lowden had started out in Las Vegas as a musician in 1965. He was promoted to music director first at the Flamingo, then at the Hacienda, in which he purchased ownership points. Lowden wound up owning the Hacienda outright in 1977 and parlayed the equity into ownership of the Sahara. He built a third tower (26 stories, 575 rooms) and a convention center in 1988 and another 600-room tower in 1990. 

Lowden sold the Sahara in 1995 to William Bennett, former CEO and chairman of Circus Circus, for $150 million. Bennett sank another $150 million into renovating the aging property, adding a parking garage, doubling the size of the casino, and redoing the porte cochere with a neon Moroccan-style dome. He also installed Speed The Ride, a full-loop rollercoaster that circled the front of the resort, and Sahara Speedworld, a virtual-reality racing center. 

With Bennett's health failing, the family sold the resort to Stockbridge, a private-equity company, and 32-year-old Sam Nazarian, an L.A.-based nightclub and hotel businessman, for $331 million in 2007. They closed the Sahara in May 2011; then it took two years to secure the nearly $750 million in financing to completely redo the place according to Nazarian's contemporary vision. The property reopened in August 2014 in time for Labor Day weekend as the SLS, which stood for "Service, Luxury, Style." 

The SLS era and the property's return to its Sahara roots will be covered in tomorrow's QoD.