Question of the Day - 26 July 2021

The Thunderbird was the first of four names of the hotel-casino on a property on the east side of the north Strip, north of the Riviera and south of the Sahara. 

It opened in 1948, named after a mythical creature that symbolized power and strength to various North American indigenous cultures. It was the fourth resort-casino on the fledgling Strip, after the El Rancho, Last Frontier, and Flamingo, built and owned by casino developer Marion Hicks (who also built the El Cortez, which opened in 1941) and Clifford Jones, then lieutenant governor of Nevada.

From the start, the Thunderbird was suspected of hidden mob ownership (fronted by Jake Lansky, Meyer's brother), but that was never proved, at least openly, and Hicks and Jones managed to hang onto ownership until they sold out to Del Webb, who after a few years sold it to Caesars World. Caesars' plans to raze the building and replace it with a new $150 million resort came to naught and they sold it to an investment company that leased it to casino operator Major Riddle in 1977; Riddle changed the name to the Silver Bird (though why he named it after a small flycatcher native to East Africa is unknown).

Riddle died three years later. The Silver Bird closed a year after that and reopened a year after that, when it was purchased by Ed Torres, a somewhat notorious casino owner who was a partner of Wayne Newton in the Aladdin at the time and had a hand in the Fremont during its early years. Torres renamed it El Rancho Vegas, replicating the name of the first resort on the incipient Strip, which burned to the ground in 1960. He refurbished it in a western-frontier theme, added a 52-lane bowling alley, then spent $15 million renovating the joint and invested another $20 million in a 13-story 585-room hotel tower. 

Alas, the El Rancho was tired and rundown after 10 years of neglect and after the Mirage, Rio, and Excalibur opened and MGM Grand, Luxor, and Treasure Island were racing to completion. Torres closed it in July 1992, unable to find anyone interested in buying the place. 

The number of sales, new owners, and proposed projects for the 20-acre property over the next five years would take five years to list.

Finally, in 1997, Turnberry Associates, which was building several high-rise condo buildings nearby, bought and imploded the property, just to get rid of it from the view of its prospective condo owners. In 2000, the hotel tower was imploded.

Turnberry announced one of several London-themed hotel-casinos that never came to fruition in Las Vegas, then started building the Miami-themed Fontainebleau in 2007 on the old Thunderbird site. 

To pick up the story from there, see our two-part series on the Fontainebleau's sordid history: Part 1 and Part 2.