The Dunes was an iconic Las Vegas Hotel whose name even today is still remembered along the strip. It’s long gone now, of course – imploded in two stages to make way for The Bellagio in 1993 and 1994. This being Vegas, though, it’s demise was as spectacular as the old hotel’s reputation merited. The following post, therefore, provides a brief history of the Las Vegas Dunes hotel.

A brief history of the Las Vegas Dunes

Image courtesy of Nevada State Museum and Historical Society – 700 Twin Lakes Drive, Las Vegas, Nevada 89107. 702.486.5205

The Dunes hotel was one of the early hotels on the Las Vegas strip, opening its doors in 1955. Together with the Sand and Desert Inn hotels, it was known as one of the three Kings of Las Vegas.

Back then, the Dunes was at the southernmost tip of the strip, and due to its remote location, it struggled to make money.

Today, of course, The Bellagio, which stands proudly where the Dunes used to be, is located in the middle of the strip, with New York New York, MGM Grand, Excalibur, Luxor and Mandalay Bay all much further south. But in 1955, Las Vegas was a very different town, and the strip was much smaller. Even the hotels were smaller, with the Dunes having only 200 rooms when it was first opened.

The Dunes and the Mob

Photography by Erik Wunstell © April, 1977-2006

The Dunes achieved its legendary status thanks in part to decades of mob rule. Both the Mafia and money from the Teamsters’ pension fund helped to build the hotel, and it was owned for many years by Morris Shenker, who was allegedly associated with the St. Louis Mafia.

In addition to its mob links, the Dunes was also made famous by recruiting star performers such as Frank Sinatra to sing at the hotel, in an effort to lure the paying punters in. Still struggling, though, even with the might of Frank and co, it opened Las Vegas’s first topless show called Minsky’s Follies in 1957, which drew in an audience of 16,000, which, at the time, was a record for a single week’s attendance. The Dunes was saved, and lived for another 36 years.

The Dunes expands

© 2001-2002 University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Flushed with the success of its topless show, the Dunes had (some) cash in the bank, and added a golf course and a new exhibitor and convention center in 1959. A new tower called the Diamond of the Dunes was also added in 1961, bringing the total number of rooms to 450.

In 1964, the Dunes led the way in lighting up the Las Vegas skyline with the addition of 180 foot neon sign. Shaped like a giant onion, it apparently evoked images from A Thousand and One Nights , and had “electric lava” erupting through the sky every minute. Mmmm, classy!

Photo by Erik Lauritzen, NHS Photo Collection

Unfortunately, it was also expensive, costing $47,000 a year to operate, but the Dunes didn’t care – it was making money, and needed to tell the world (well, the Las Vegas strip, anyway!) where it was. Thus, the trend for ever bigger, ever more attention-seeking hotels and signages was born, which has ultimately led to the amazing hotels that currently grace the Strip. Las Vegas really is survival of the fittest, with onyl the most attention-grabbing hotels surviving, and the Dunes was the first to do this in style.

In 1979, a new 17-storey tower was built to bring the total number of rooms to 1,300. These rooms were lavish, and featured the most luxurious resort rooms in Las Vegas.

The final years

Photos by John Gurzinski, Las Vegas ReviewJournal

By 1987, though, things were starting to go wrong again. The Dunes was bought by Japanese investor Masao Nangaku for $155 million, but it was showing its age, and he couldn’t make any money out of it. So he sold it in 1992 to Steve Wynn for just $75 million, who had no intentions of turning it round. Instead, he wanted to blow the thing up and replace it with a much, much grander hotel and casino – The Bellagio.

And so it was that on October 20th 1993, the first of the two Dunes towers was imploded in dramatic style, with one of the pirate ships from Treasure Island firing its cannon just before the implosion, in a mock attack on the Dunes.

It was also a hugely symbolic act, as it represented the overthrowing of the Mafia’s influence on Vegas, and the beginning of a new era, in which huge new mega resorts began to dominate the Las Vegas skyline.

The Bellagio was built in its place, providing a spectacular fountain show, the likes of which the Dunes could never compete with. Another Las Vegas legend passed into history, while a new one was built in its place.

[Source: Wikipedia, A2ZLasVegas, LegendsOfAmerica]

Even more remarkable is the sheer scale of redevelopment that’s going on within the 3.5 miles of the Las Vegas strip. More than $30 billion is being pumped in to develop new mega hotels that make the existing ones look like sheds. If you’ve never been to Vegas before, go now to catch a glimpse of the 20th Century Vegas before the 21st Century comes rushing in.

Before you do, though, read on to understand how a small town in the desert became one of the modern wonders of the world, and see what $30 billion of new Las Vegas hotels will bring to the future of this amazing place.

Note: This article was first published in EzineArticles – but that’s OK, because I wrote it! If you’d like to include it in your site, you have my permission to reprint it in its entirety (you can skip this bit in italics!), but you must include the links at the bottom

The birth of Las Vegas

Las Vegas as we know it today can trace its roots back to 1941, when the El Rancho, the Strip’s first hotel-casino, opened its doors. The success of the El Rancho spurred the first building-boom on the Strip in the late 1940s and early 1950s, with the construction of legendary casinos such as the Flamingo, Desert Inn, The Sands, The Tropicana and The Stardust, all hastily constructed to capitalize on the massive profits that gambling was bringing into the city.

Needless to say these early casinos were owned by the mob, and Vegas well and truly earned its reputation as Sin City.

The 1960s: Howard Hughes and the end of the Mob

The mob’s presence in Las Vegas declined with the arrival of Howard Hughes in 1966, who, over the following four years, bought out many of the mobsters. First the Desert Inn, then the Sands and the Frontier, plus several smaller casinos, all fell into the ownership of Hughes.

His presence in the city encouraged other legitimate businessmen to follow his lead and also invest in the city. The most prominent was billionaire Kirk Kirkorian, who built the International (now the Las Vegas Hilton) in 1968, followed by the MGM Grand in 1973.

Hughes competed furiously with Kirkorian and built the Landmark hotel, a 346 foot monstrosity that took ten years to build, never made any money, but was taller than Kirkorian’s International Hotel, which was all Hughes was after.

The 1990s: The rise of the Mega-Resorts

After the opening of the MGM Grand, though, building on the strip stalled. It wasn’t until 1986 that work began on the next major new hotel.

The Mirage, a $630 million hotel and casino built by Steve Wynn, was a huge gamble as it had to make $1 million a day just to service the debt incurred in building it. However, its opening in 1989 brought huge success, and helped usher in the next great wave of construction to the city: the rise of the Mega-Resorts.

In 1990, Circus Circus Enterprises built the 3,991 room camelot-themed Excalibur hotel at the south of the Strip for $290 million. At the time, the Excalibur was the largest hotel in the world, but this record wouldn’t last for long.

Just three years later, Kirk Kirkorian, who had sold his existing MGM Grand (which was subsequently renamed Bally’s), built another MGM Grand opposite Excalibur with over 5,000 rooms.

1993, the year of the new MGM Grand’s opening, was a watershed year for Las Vegas. The Dunes hotel was imploded, Steve Wynn’s new 2,885 room Treasure Island hotel was opened, and Circus Circus Enterprises (now called Mandalay Resort Group) opened the new 4,407 room Luxor hotel, designed as a gigantic black hollow pyramid. The era of the themed mega-resort had well and truly arrived in Las Vegas, as these hotels were followed by the Stratosphere, New York New York, Paris and The Venetian, which all opened their doors in the 1990s.

It wasn’t just themed resorts that were opening, though. Las Vegas was going upmarket, too, with more exclusive and non-themed hotels, such as Mandalay Bay and the Bellagio, also opening during this period. At $1.7 billion, Wynn’s The Bellagio was the most expensive hotel yet built in Las Vegas, and set the standard for the next construction boom that would begin in the early 2000s.

All this construction had come at a cost to old Las Vegas, though. The Sands was demolished to make way for The Venetian, the Dunes made way for The Bellagio, while the Landmark, Hughes’s ill-fated attempt to beat Kirkorian, was demolished to become a car park for the Las Vegas Convention Center. Las Vegas never did do sentimental!

Coming Soon: $30 billion of new Vegas hotels

The five years from 2000 to 2005 saw another brief hiatus in construction. This came to an end in 2005, though, with the opening of the new Wynn Las Vegas, a $2.7 billion 2,716 room luxury hotel. The Wynn was built on the site of the old Desert Inn, which Wynn had demolished in 2001, just four years after a $200 million renovation and expansion of the old hotel.

The Wynn follows in the footsteps of The Bellagio in being a luxurious high quality hotel. Its success has helped sparked the biggest boom in construction that Las Vegas has ever seen, with the last of the old hotels falling like dominoes, and new super-luxurious multi-billion dollar hotels taking their place. Las Vegas is being transformed like no other city on Earth.

In the two years since the Wynn first opened, five new mega-hotels have begun construction, each of which makes the Wynn look cheap in comparison. Between 2007 and 2010, the following mega-resorts will open:

• The Encore at Wynn, a $1.74 billion 2,054 room sister-hotel to the Wynn that will rise to 653 feet
• The Palazzo, a $1.8 billion 3,025 room hotel that will be a sister hotel to The Venetian. With over 7,000 rooms between them, the new Venetian/Palazzo complex will become the biggest hotel in the world
• Echelon Place, a $4 billion complex of hotels, casinos and condominiums, that’s currently being built on the ashes of the old Stardust (which was imploded earlier in 2007)
• Fontainebleau Las Vegas, a $3 billion hotel being built opposite Circus Circus that will soar 63 stories high
• Project City Center, a $7.7 billion complex of hotels comprising over 7,000 hotel rooms, situated between New York New York and the Monte Carlo

These hotels are currently under construction, and will open between early 2008 and 2010. They’re by no means the end of the story, though. Hotels that are about to begin construction include The Plaza, a $5 billion hotel that will be built on the site of the New Frontier, which will be imploded later in 2007; and the Crown Las Vegas, a new hotel that will be built next to the Fontainebleau, and which will soar an incredible 1,888 feet.

In addition, MGM Mirage, the company behind Project CityCenter, plan to build another mega-resort of similar scale north of Circus Circus, while Steve Wynn has plans to redevelop the golf course sitting behind The Wynn, and turn it into – yes – another multi-billion dollar hotel!

In total, more than $30 billion dollars is being pumped into Las Vegas, making this the biggest construction boom in the city’s already stellar history. If you’ve never been to Las Vegas before, go now to catch a glimpse of 20th Century Vegas before the 21st Century rushes in and transforms it forever.

GloriousLasVegas.com

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Mike Evans publishes GloriousLasVegas.com, a website with news, hotel reviews and photos on Las Vegas past, present and future.

At GloriousLasVegas.com, you can read more on new Las Vegas hotels, or check out photos of Las Vegas hotels and casinos in the Las Vegas photo gallery.

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But it wasn’t always like that. Ten years ago, the Venetian and the Bellagio were both under construction as their owners, Sheldon Adelson and Steve Wynn, went head to head in their own personal mini building-boom. Back then, though, analysts were predicting a bloodbath, as the thought of Vegas supporting just two more mega-casinos seemed destined to render one of the casino billionaires bankrupt.

Read on for more details of the Bellagio vs the Venetian in the first of our new History of Las Vegas series.

In 1997, Las Vegas was a very different place. For many years, no new hotels had been built on the strip. The 1990s changed all that, with first the Mirage, and then a succession of themed hotels, starting with the Excalibur and Luxor, adding to an explosion of new projects that helped create the Vegas of today.

By 1997, though, many analysts thought that Las Vegas had reached saturation point, and that any more new hotels would lead to thousands of empty rooms.

It was this point that Steve Wynn decided to build the Belalgio, while his arch-rival Sheldon Adelson thought the Venetian would be a good idea.

Wynn vs Adelson – round 1

By 1997, Steve Wynn had seen his $624 million Mirage hotel turn from a huge gamble into a roaring success. Featuring 3,000 rooms, it had paid for itself twice over, and helped Wynn not only amass a fortune ready for his next big venture, but also given him the credibility he needed to gain financial backers for his next grand project – the Bellagio.

In contrast, Adelson was losing a fortune on the old Sands hotel that he’d bought in 1988 for $128 million (today, $128 million would buy you just 5 acres of land on the strip!). In five years, it lost money, and Adelson had tried four different management teams to turn it around, all without success. The only hope he had was ot blow it up and build another hotel in its place – the Venetian.

The Belalgio vs the Venetian

And so it was that two of the Strip’s now-iconic hotels were born. The Bellagio would cost Wynn $1.5 billion, while the Venetian would cost Adelson $1.3 billion. Analysts thought that both were a gamble too far, that Las Vegas simply could not support the 7,000 extra room these two mega-hotels would add to the Strip.

Erick Lucera, an analyst at Boston-based Independence Investment Associates, claimed that “Nineteen ninety-nine [the year that the two hotels would open] is shaping up to be a bloodbath,” while Forbes went on to ask:

“Whats going on here? Do these guys really believe that the gambling market is infinite? Las Vegas is already saturated with rooms — 104,000 at present count — with 12,800 more hotel rooms in the building stage.”

Of course, both hotels went on to become spectacular successes, and were swiftly followed by other multi-billion dollar projects, such as Paris, Mandalay Bay and the Aladdin.

1997 – 2007: compare and contrast

Both the Bellagio and the Venetian were seen as huge gambles back when Las Vegas was much smaller than it is now. Today, we have $30 billion dollars of new hotels being built, and yet no-one is questioning whether the Strip can support such extra capacity.

But it’s not just the extra hotel rooms that are being built. Millions of square feet of extra retail space and convention space are also being built, and still no-one’s questioning whether Las Vegas can support this extra capacity.

Times have certainly changed, and it’s almost comical to look back and see the concerns people had over the building of what turned out to be two runaway successes that helped turned Las Vegas into what it is today.

Let’s just hope we’ll be saying the same thing in another ten years’ time, when $60 billion of new hotels stand proud, each hoping that it’s not a gamble too far.

[Source: Forbes]

The main hotel is the large left building, while the building towards the right is a new condo that’s being built as part of the new complex. You can just about see the existing Venetian sandwiched between the two.

Although the new condo’s rooms should have glorious views of the strip (and which should remain glorious, given that the land either side is owned by Sands), it does look very prominent – I’m not sure how well it’ll fit in with the rest of the Palazzo/Venetian development. You can certainly tell it was designed after The Palazzo, as it almost looks like it’s just plonked there as an afterthought!

[Source: Skyscraperpage]