The Las Vegas Riviera Hotel casino & resort

In 1959, Riviera was sold to a group led by Ed Levinson of Fremont Hotel and Carl Cohen and Jack Entratter of Sands Hotel. The Riviera Hotel was proposed by the Detroit gang William Bischoff and was called the Casino of Casablanca at the time. Investors used acquaintances, including Chicago-based organized crime associates, to turn to the former Flamingo Hotel executive Gus Greenbaum, who is considered an efficient casino operator responsible for running Riviera. When Rat Pack members left the resort in the 1970s, Riviera bought the property.

The Riviera has become one of the oldest and most popular casino resorts in the Las Vegas Valley. Riviera expanded its gaming space and in 1990 owned the largest casino in Las Vegas with an area of approximately 125,000 square feet. In 1990, Riviera expanded its casino to 70,000 square feet, bringing its sidewalk area to nearly 125,000 square feet, making it one of the largest casinos in the world, offering slot machines and slot machines, table games, poker, keno, bingo and whole Book. Games and sports.

In 1975, a 17-story Monte Carlo tower was added on the Riviera for $ 20 million. It consisted of 300 rooms, 60 suites and a luxury penthouse, with a total of 1000 rooms. In 1988, the Riviera added the 24-story Monaco tower, which cost $ 28 million, and nearly doubled the size of the resort to 2,100 rooms.
The Riviera was the ninth resort to be built on the Las Vegas Strip and was designed by a Miami-based architect after a previous attempt to build on the site had failed. Built for roughly $ 10 million, Riviera has joined Dunes, Royal and Hacienda as real estate lanes.

The casino was opened by the famous pianist Liberace, who was the highest paid artist on the Las Vegas Strip and earned $ 50,000 a week. The Riviera opened in 1955 at the northern tip of the Las Vegas Strip and has had stars like Liberace, Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand and Dean Martin.
The Riviera opened on April 20, 1955, with Chicago Outfit employees on the list. It was also the first Strip Resort to introduce one of its artists (Liberace, a few days after opening in 1955) live, making the hotel famous throughout the country and encouraging other Strip hotels to broadcast their artists on television to receive national advertising. … The opening of the Riviera along with the Dunes and the Royal Nevada Resort Casino within a month was the theme of the famous June 20, 1955 issue of Life magazine, with the Moulin Rouge girl on the cover.

In the same year, the Riviera suffered huge losses due to the decline in popularity caused by the reduction in pedestrian traffic in the surrounding area. The closure of construction work at the nearby Fortainebleau Resort Las Vegas and Echelon Place has also led to this massive downturn.
Last year, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority acquired the old Riviera Casino as part of its $1.4 billion plan to renovate and expand the existing convention center across Paradise Road. The Riviera Hotel and Casino has a long history and is one of the first Las Vegas high-end hotels in Nevada, known for its famous entertainment and hospitality as well as global acclaim.

Riviera was used as a background in three of the most famous films shot in Las Vegas, including the original film “Mouse” in 1960, the James Bond film “Forever Diamond” in 1971, and “casino”. The 1995 film was adapted from a real gangster in Las Vegas. Rosenthal and Anthony Spilotro were in the heyday of Stardust in the 1970s. Focusing on some of the great moments of the Riviera, one of the most iconic moments was Martin Scorsese’s 1995 movie “Casino” where most of it was shot.

The last film to use Riviera as a backdrop was Matt Damon’s Jason Bourne, set in 2016 when a truck crashed into the resort’s front doors. With its star-lit glass façade, visitors cannot miss the Riviera as they drive along the Strip. The rundown and doomed Riviera, which opened on this day in 1955, has had many different names over the years.

Now, and purely for research purposes, dedicated Las Vegas historians want to know what happened to the immensely popular and classy Riviera “No Ifs, Ands, or …”, bronze smooth-backed “Crazy Girls” dancers. which so subtly decorated the main entrance to the casino.

It can be imagined that parts of the original Riviera hotel structure were modeled after the Miami Beach hotels of that era. Before debuting on the Riviera, the Strip hotels were low-rise garden-style dwellings, usually centered around a pool or the convenience of driving and parking near your room. The hotels were originally small and resembled car manufacturers, many of which were one-story with a limited number of casinos, compared to the modern metropolitan areas we see on the street.

Since the founding of the Strip, many hotels have been built and then demolished in favor of the bigger, bigger and better resorts and casinos. Over the years, like many of the strip casinos of a certain era, the Riviera has undergone both internal and structural expansion. He added a casino space, a hotel tower, a parking lot, a conference room and so on, turning into a jumble of architectural themes and side thoughts.

Although it operated for most of its sixty years of existence, it suffered a series of disruptions, including the first just three months after opening. If you are like many, you probably thought the Riviera was already in self-destruction when it closed in May 2015 after 60 years of operation. It was last owned by the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, which decided to demolish it to make way for the Las Vegas global business district. Eleven stories high, it was the first “Strips” skyscraper, as previous hotel developers mistakenly assumed that desert areas, Kalishe soil and its groundwater would only support low-rise buildings.

Right on the sidewalk of the Strip, there is the William Hill Race & Sports Betting Window. In August 2011, Riviera reopened its bingo hall to attract new customers and compete with the new resorts on the Strip. In 1994, Riviera was the host of the Canadian Football League’s short-lived Las Vegas Posse training ground during the league’s brief expansion to the United States. Dean Martin was hired in 1969 to perform in a casino showroom and received a 10% stake in the Riviera.