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In its salad days the Sahara Hotel-Casino hosted many of Las Vegas’s iconic megastars. The Beatles crashed there when they played Vegas in 1964. Don Rickles performed there. Johnny Carson. The Rat Pack helped make it famous. Old-timers credit the Sahara with basically inventing the Strip lounge scene.
But that’s the problem.
Lady Gaga wouldn’t step foot in the place today. Kim Kardashian probably doesn’t even know it exists. If Paris Hilton has ever seen it, it was no doubt with glazed eyes and in a squad car headed toward a holding cell downtown.
On the north fringe of the Las Vegas Strip, the Sahara has run out of steam, and like the Baby Boom generation, it’s ready to retire after nearly 60 years on the scene. Bleeding red ink, the owner of the Moroccan-themed resort says the doors will be locked – probably for good, although in Vegas nothing is ever certain – on May 16.
The news raised eyebrows, but only those who haven’t been paying attention to the economic downturn are puzzled today by the demise of the Sahara.
The recession may be abating elsewhere, but it is still on full display on the Strip’s north end. Empty lots are testament to the bleak economic landscape and across the street from the Sahara stand girders that might never support a completed Echelon Place where the venerable Stardust was imploded in 2007.
SAM NAZARIAN ignored the still-in-its-infancy recession when he bought the Sahara in 2008, figuring that he could duplicate in Vegas the success in real estate development that had made him rich in Los Angeles. The 36-year-old entrepreneur had been credited with reviving what had been a sagging LA club scene, and had no doubt that his magic touch would allow the Sahara to function without the aid of an oxygen tank.
The plan was simple: Untold numbers of young party-lovers were priced out in LA. So bring them to Vegas at more reasonable prices. “There is an alienation of the high-energy, youthful crowd,” Nazarian said at the time.
Every area of the hotel and casino were fair game for renovation, said Nazarian, promising plastic surgery to the worn-down casino and restaurant area, plus a new hotel tower. The Vegas Strip modus operandi (implosion, followed shortly after by construction) was rejected, and Nazarian figured that by 2011 everything would be in place and that the Sahara would be at the heart of a revival of the North Strip.
But even the energetic Nazarian found the going more than difficult as he sailed into powerful recessionary headwinds. He was unsuccessful in making the site anything more than an economical place to sleep for low-budget tourists who each day hopped on the new Monorail and spent their time (and money) elsewhere. Quite often the casino was almost empty weekday mornings.
Through the latter stages of the 2000s the Sahara was hit with a double whammy.
Struggling to fill rooms themselves, other hotels in the South (MGM, New York/New York) and Center (Paris/Bellagio/Mirage) Strip areas were forced to drop their own prices. Given a choice between a $60 room in a good location and a $30 room at the Sahara, it was not much of a choice at all. With low-cost alternatives, reservations plummeted as the Sahara’s raison d’etre grew smaller and smaller. In December 2009 the Sahara closed off two of its three hotel towers, and suspended its buffet.
With so many alternatives, sports gamblers had no real reason to come to the Sahara. The book was sandwiched into an unused corner, with the registration desk situated between the casino and book. Thirty seats, not a whole lot of televisions. One website sarcastically described the sports book this way: “Come here to curl up and die.” It’s now run by Leroy’s, which handles many of the smaller sports books in Las Vegas.
The demise of the Sahara will further isolate the Stratosphere, which will now be a solid half-mile north of the next-nearest properties – Circus-Circus and the Riviera. The views available when walking from Circus-Circus to the Strat are of empty parking lots and abandoned projects, and no one with an ounce of common sense will make the trek after dark.
YOU WOULD HAVE TO BE at least into your seventh decade to remember the Sahara when it still had game, when Frank would be on the marquee and Dean and Sammy might drop in and perform with him for the final half-hour, when Jack Benny told jokes here.
When Sonny and Cher performed to sellout crowds. Now, the once-popular hotel-casino is entering its final two months of life in a form of hospitality hospice care.
Nazarian, who when buying the Sahara for $331.8 million chose to ignore the three most important tenets of running a business (location, location, location), says that he’s still open to re-opening when the economy improves. For now, though, over a thousand Sahara employees will soon join the ranks of the unemployed. “With Las Vegas showing early signs of recovery,” said Nazarian, “we are confident that we ultimately will find a creative and comprehensive new solution for this historic property.”
The key word there is historic. In a city that worships the present and future, the Sahara has for too long been all about the past. As one-time Vegas performers Chad and Jeremy put it in their 1963 song, “But that was yesterday, and yesterday’s gone.”
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