I was sad to hear the news that the Sahara Hotel & Casino, which dates to the 1950s heyday of Frank Sinatra's "Rat Pack" and has featured the likes of Mae West and Marlene Dietrich in its showrooms, will close May 16.
But I had to admit I hadn't spent more than a couple of hours in the place over the past 10 years. And that's the
Where once Dietrich danced and Tony Bennett crooned, the Sahara lately is best known for its indoor-outdoor roller coaster (a remnant of Vegas' ill-fated attempt to become a family resort) and the NASCAR Cafe, with its heart-attack-in-a-tortilla 6-pound burrito. It was no coincidence that the hotel's owners waited to announce they were shutting down until a few days after Carl Edwards took the checkered flag at the Kobalt Tools 400 and the thousands of stock car fans steered back out of town.
Hotel officials said ownership was considering its options on whether to rebrand the hotel or redevelop the aging property. It's not going to be easy.
The hotel, at the far northern end of the Strip, has struggled in recent years with changing ownership and a location surrounded by the empty Fontainebleau and Echelon, two hotel projects that stalled in the recent financial downturn.
For almost 60 years, the Sahara has been a name synonymous with the Strip, its place enshrined with the avenue running east-west next to the property bearing its name. Fans loved the Sahara because of its smaller size and the fact that despite many makeovers, it still had the general lines of the hotel that was a hot spot in the 1950s. But it was that lack of an overhaul that doomed the property.
"The continued operation of the aging Sahara was no longer economically viable," Chief Executive Sam Nazarian of owner SBE Entertainment Group told The Associated Press.
It was a long, hard fall. The Sahara was one of the top casinos when it opened in 1952 and its showroom featured Dietrich, who made the transition from Hollywood star to Sin City chanteuse. West had a 1954 nightclub act featuring several bodybuilders, earning her a reported $25,000 per week.
The hotel was a setting of the original version of "Ocean's Eleven," the story of a gang that robs casinos. In the original version, the buddies included Sinatra, Dean Martin, Joey Bishop, Peter Lawford, Sammy Davis Jr. and other members of the Rat Pack. The film was considered a hyper-casual excuse for a Rat Pack party-on-film until its rediscovery after a 21st century remake with George Clooney in the lead and the Bellagio taking the place of the Sahara.
In recent years the Sahara has tried a number of formulas to stay in the gambling game, most recently moving down-market with heavily discounted rooms.
The Sahara is one of the last of the classic early-generation Strip casinos, a list that once included the Desert Inn, Aladdin and Hacienda as well as the spots already mentioned. Names still around from the Strip's first heyday include the Flamingo, Riviera and Tropicana - though none remains in the upper end of the ever-morphing hotel market. Even in the face of the worst economic downturn in decades, the new City Center project with three hotels and the sleek Cosmopolitan poured thousands more rooms into the competition. The Sahara finally threw in the towel.
Realistically, redeveloping the Sahara is probably not an option in the near future. I believe there is money to be made in coming up with a Rat Pack throwback hotel that plays off its heritage. Places like the Riviera Resort in Palm Springs and the Hotel Valley Ho in Scottsdale have gone the retro route. Maybe the math doesn't work in Las Vegas, where rooms are often "loss leaders" meant to pile in as many gamblers as possible.
In that case, the Sahara likely one day will follow in the footsteps of so many other Vegas hotels with a grand fireworks display and implosion. The debris will be carted away, and all that will remain is Sahara Avenue.
Gary A. Warner: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
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