Question of the Day - 15 March 2024

For starters, it wasn’t built under the Strip — or even anywhere near it. The Underground House, as it’s known, sits on (or under) a quiet residential street near the intersection of Flamingo Road and Maryland Parkway.

It was built in the '70s by Avon Products director and plurality shareholder Girard Brown “Jerry” Henderson (1905-83), a great believer in subterranean living. He’d sponsored an Underground Living display at the New York World’s Fair of 1964. He grew up on a working farm in Suffern, New York, just north of New York City, which may have influenced his belief in self-reliance.

Credit also goes to architect Jay Swayze, who built a 40,000-square-foot bomb shelter in Plainview, Texas, which evidently had a formative influence on Henderson, sufficiently impressed to invest in Swayze’s Underground House Company.

A Dartmouth College dropout after his freshman year, the nun-schooled Henderson soon made the transition to the garment trade, catching on at Cheney Silk Co. in 1925. He later became a door-to-door salesman for the Club Aluminum Co., then joined a stock brokerage in 1928. The crash of 1929 quickly put an end to that and Henderson found himself selling life insurance.

In 1940, Henderson was voted onto the Avon board of directors, where he remained for 35 years. Nine years later, he formed Alarm Corp., evidently motivated by the theft of a potted plant from the front porch of his Carmel, California, residence. In the years that immediately followed, Henderson brought cable TV to the Carmel area, installing the requisite line in order to assist those residents who couldn’t get a decent signal over the airwaves.

In 1964, Jerry Henderson built the precursor to his Vegas pied-a-terre in Boulder, Colorado. In some ways, it was even grander than his Sin City crib would be, featuring a helipad, four subterranean bedrooms, even a swimming pool, with the walls bearing murals of San Francisco and New York City, the two metropolises that bookended his business life.

That same year, Henderson invested in the Blue Channel seafood firm, buying it outright four years later. During this time, the businessman became a director of the New York Stock Exchange and founded the Colorado Junior Republic School for underprivileged kids. 

In 1969, Henderson up and moved his business interests to Las Vegas, just ahead of a nasty lawsuit about his business dealings. His choice of Sin City was at least partially influenced by having gotten married here in 1964.

He broke ground on the Underground House in 1971 (it took seven years to finish) and it doubled as the headquarters of Henderson’s holding company, ADI. His normally quiet — some would say mundane — life was punctuated by overseas trips and the occasional profile in magazines such as Forbes. He also built, near his Vegas home, the Alexander Dawson Building, for a time the headquarters of Howard Hughes’ Summa Corporation.

Despite whatever Cold War fears may have fueled him, Henderson was no advocate of a spartan futuristic existence. The Underground House contains two bedrooms, three baths, a sauna, swimming pool, pair of hot tubs, putting green (four holes), waterfall, dance floor, bar, barbecue, and a lighting array that could be altered to simulate different times of day. 

It was cheaper and more temperate to live underground, which seems to have appealed to Henderson’s inbuilt parsimony.

Even two underground mansions weren’t sufficient isolation for Henderson. He moved in 1979 to Cecil Point Station in New Zealand, along the shores of Lake Wakitipu. There he built an octagonal house that stands to this day, now owned by ADI. It could be reached only by seaplane or boat. One catch: Non-New Zealanders cannot own permanent residences. That was why the Cecil Peak Station house was built atop skids and free from pillars.

The above-ground house that you see in Las Vegas on the site was a posthumous addition by Henderson’s widow, who was fed up with maintaining domesticity 26 feet below ground, reached via elevator. She had the Underground House site cleared of boulders and a regular domicile built onto it. 

As for the popularity of the Underground House, it was put up for sale in 2004 with an asking price of $3 million. It went for $1.15 million … 10 years later. It obviously wasn't particularly popular with house hunters. It's perpetually for sale and if you want it, you can make a bid on the house's website.

If buying it is a bit rich for your budget or too ... odd, you can go to 3970 Spencer Street and gawk at it. Failing that, take a virtual tour. It’s been a popular site for parties and meetings, as well as a photographic backdrop.