Las Vegas Tries to Save Its Past

Like clean government in Chicago, healthy air in Los Angeles and sizzling night life in Salt Lake City, a list of urban oxymorons might be topped by “historic preservation in Las Vegas.”

The city’s great gambling monuments seem to come crashing down nearly as often as Don Rickles comes to town. Structures that predate 1950 cling to life like a trailer park in a tornado.

Yet, in the capital of flash and cash, a determined few are struggling to save some remnants of Las Vegas’ past. And more than ever before, they are achieving small victories.

The state last month approved historic status for the Huntridge, a Streamline Moderne-style movie theater. A new owner seems poised to restore and reopen the Moulin Rouge, once the hippest haven of African American entertainers in a formerly segregated city. Destruction of historic buildings is more difficult and new regulations have made Las Vegas eligible for expedited federal restoration funding.

“We as Las Vegans have not had a real sense of community and what historic buildings mean,” said Richard Lenz, head of the nonprofit group that is restoring the Huntridge Performing Arts Theater. “It’s always the newer, the bigger, the better. The problem with that is, you kind of lose your soul.

“We’re trying to change that a little.”

The first challenge of historic preservation in Las Vegas is persuading people that there is anything worth preserving. Newcomers, in particular, tend to sneer at consecrating buildings constructed during their lifetimes.

Few buildings in the city have reached the ripe age of 50--typically a standard for listing by the National Register of Historic Places.

“You could almost say Las Vegas was practicing ‘preventive preservation,’ ” said Ron James, a historic preservation officer for the state of Nevada. With just 13 properties on the federal listing, Las Vegas makes Los Angeles County--with 344 listings--look like a virtual Constantinople.

But a handful of Las Vegas landmarks remain, from the city’s founding early in this century as a railroad stop, through its rise in the 1930s as a favorite watering hole for Boulder Dam laborers.

Even one of the town’s greatest historical champions--Frank Wright, a curator at the Nevada State Museum and Historical Society--concedes that the buildings are “not Mt. Vernon” and “not necessarily masterpieces of architecture.” But remnants of the past should be honored because they evoke a uniquely American sense of free enterprise and audacious entertainment, Wright said.

Wright appreciates the intricately carved mosaics on the facade of the Las Vegas Academy of International Studies and Performing Arts (which opened in 1930 as Las Vegas High School). It is the only full-scale Art Deco structure in the city. He warms to stories about the Green Shack, a 69-year-old family restaurant that once sat on a highway of debauchery that linked the town with the dam construction site along the Colorado River.

The architecture of the Huntridge Theater dates only to 1944 and may seem plain by some cities’ standards. But still, it is a rare example here of Streamline Moderne architecture, a style of clean, austere lines born in the 1930s, Wright said.

What’s more, said owner Lenz, it evokes the era when Elvis rented the place for private screenings and Abbott and Costello performed skits to introduce their films.

The theater’s listing this month on the Nevada Register of Historic Places is another small piece in its restoration plan. At least as important to the theater’s survival, however, has been its ability to stage acts such as the “Insane Clown Posse” and “‘Foo Fighters.”

“People come to the Huntridge because it puts on events,” said Lenz, president of the nonprofit. “Then hopefully they will begin to appreciate the cool atmosphere.”

With any commercial endeavor comes compromises, some of which would make architectural purists blanch. The inside and outside have been painted an outrageous hue of aqua-teal to attract patrons and a wrought-iron fence has been built to keep gate-crashers out of concerts, marring the building’s facade.

But the reality is that historic preservation often won’t occur in Las Vegas if the building doesn’t make money. Bart Maybie insists that one won’t come without the other at the Moulin Rouge, a rundown former hotel-casino far off the beaten path, in a neighborhood of warehouses and a rescue mission. So, after paying $3 million for the shuttered resort, Maybie’s company has spent at least $5 million more to buy and renovate several surrounding apartment complexes that were havens for crime and drug abuse. “I felt before I could save the casino, I really had to control the area,” Maybie said.

Although tired, unshaven men still loiter at midday, Maybie said things are getting better. Adjacent to the Moulin Rouge he has filled a small shopping center with new tenants. Seven of them are churches.

The building itself--west of Interstate 15 on the city’s heavily African American westside--needs substantial repair. Carpets are torn up and walls are punched with holes.

But lining the casino walls are vivid murals of a row of African American chorus girls. Outside, the sensuously scripted Moulin Rouge sign remains a signature piece. But before the undulating rows of pink neon tubes can be lit again (at a cost of $1,100 a month), much work has to be done.

Maybie, who previously specialized in housing and shopping center renewal, hopes the club can return to its roots by catering to an African American audience.

Club Briefly Flourished

When the Moulin Rouge opened in 1955, blacks were welcome as performers--but not guests--at the blossoming resorts along the Strip. Many of the era’s greats--Sammy Davis Jr., Pearl Bailey, Lena Horne--would perform or take a room at the Moulin.

Frank Sinatra, Jack Benny and other white entertainers knew where the action was and they, too, would show up in the wee hours--often after finishing their own shows on the Strip. In segregated Las Vegas, the club became a de facto model of integration.

“It was a wonderful, wonderful thing,” said Bob Bailey, who was emcee and a singer and is now a Las Vegas business consultant. “That was a moment, a window in time. Nothing has happened like that before and nothing has happened like that since.”

But that brief golden age under the original ownership lasted just six months. Some suspect that the hotels on the Strip became jealous of the Moulin’s success and forced it to close, although there is evidence that the casino may have fallen to an overall industry downturn.

The Moulin Rouge reopened as a casino under a series of later lessors, although the showroom never reached its early glory. In 1996 it closed, apparently for good, until Maybie arrived on the scene.

Now the building has become a focus for preservationists in Las Vegas, which in September achieved a new benchmark in its work. The National Park Service certified the city as a local government with a proactive stance toward preservation--easing the city’s ability to obtain federal grants.

That action followed the City Council’s considerable stiffening of its preservation ordinance. The council now requires delays of at least 180 days on requests to demolish historic structures, compared to the previous 60 days. It also enacted the first penalties for noncompliance.

Local activists cited at least two reasons for the increased interest in Las Vegas’ past. As residents set down roots in the fastest-growing American city of the mid-1990s, they are fighting back against the seemingly unbridled pace of progress. And as new mega-attractions continue to rise, old favorites are imploded in towers of dust--the Dunes in 1993, the Landmark in 1995, the venerable Sands and the Hacienda in 1996 and, last year, the Aladdin.

“Those implosions really got to people,” said museum curator Wright, “especially the Dunes.”

Ironically, the new monoliths along the Strip celebrate just about every metropolis and epoch except modern-day Nevada. There is a pyramid of ancient Egypt at the Luxor, the famous high-rises at New York, New York, an ersatz Eiffel Tower at the Paris and a palazzo at the Venetian resort.

It’s unlikely the economic imperatives that drive the demolition of landmark casinos will wane. Pressure persists for operators of the Strip’s mega-casinos to continually update their attractions, changes that even the city’s new preservation laws can’t stop.

Unknown to most visitors is the fact that the 88-year-old city’s boundary reaches only as far south as Sahara Avenue. That is where the heart of the infamous Strip, otherwise known as Las Vegas Boulevard, begins. Clark County retains control there. And, activists say, there’s hardly a whiff of preservation action south of the city limits.

In Las Vegas proper, sensitivity to things historic is far from entrenched.

Some still believe that to have the government saving old buildings is to besmirch the town’s essential nature--unregulated, wide open and freewheeling. The mere thought of historic preservation laws so alienated one property owner that he recently tore down a “railroad” cottage downtown merely in anticipation of the city passing its new preservation law.

But longtime residents and natives like Lenz are intent on saving at least some of their past. “There is a core.” he insisted. “There is a soul to this city.”