Martin Stern Jr.; Architect Shaped Vegas

Martin Stern Jr., the architect who in the mid-20th century designed a significant chunk of Las Vegas’ skyline and such beloved Googie-style structures as Los Angeles’ Ships coffee shops, has died. He was 84.

Stern died Saturday in Los Angeles, a spokesman for Mt. Sinai Mortuary confirmed Monday.

The architect, who moved to Los Angeles in the 1930s to work as a motion picture studio sketch artist, closed his architectural practice in 1996 and donated his more than 600 sets of drawings and plans for about 100 buildings to the University of Nevada at Las Vegas Library.

But for nearly 50 years, Stern had churned out a variety of designs, ranging from tract houses to bowling alleys, office buildings, restaurants and casino resort hotels in Las Vegas, Reno, Lake Tahoe and Atlantic City.

“Much of the history of Las Vegas [is] in the drawings of Martin Stern Jr.,” Peter Michel, UNLV director of special collections, wrote after receiving Stern’s gift to the university.

In Los Angeles, Stern was probably best known for the three Ships coffee shops opened in 1956 and 1957 by the late Emmett Shipman, who got the nickname “Ships” when he served in the Navy.

The Ships at Wilshire Boulevard and Glendon Avenue in Westwood served hearty comfort food such as chicken pot pie and half-pound hamburgers 24 hours a day for 27 years. It was razed in 1984, despite protests by preservationists, and replaced by a 22-story office building.

Two other Ships, at 1016 La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles, and at 10705 Washington Blvd., Culver City, also served the familiar fare and, as in Westwood, featured a toaster at each table. They closed in 1995. The Culver City Ships, an example of architecture once considered impossibly kitschy but now revered, is a Starbucks coffeehouse.

Leon Whiteson, who wrote about architecture for The Times, noted in a 1988 article that the Westwood Ships, with its distinctive orange color scheme and boomerang trusses that resembled a rocket ship ready to blast off, “was recognized by architectural historians and local residents as a masterpiece of the flamboyant Googie-style design.”

Whiteson in a 1990 article explained the style as a “wonderfully weird” blend of Frank Lloyd Wright, Bauhaus Modernism and Las Vegas neon jazzed up by Space Age images.

“Coffee shop designers were clearly gifted,” he wrote, listing Stern “among others [who] created a popular architecture that was purely American in its confidence in a techno future unencumbered by history or elite (read European) notions of taste.”

When Stern made his original foray into Las Vegas in 1953, that city, like Los Angeles, shaped architecture according to the vast spaces available. The result in the gambling mecca was low-rise, wide-flung wings of rooms surrounding great outdoor swimming pools. Stern’s first project was a low-rise room addition for the Sahara Hotel.

But that would soon change, and Stern was largely responsible. He designed the Sahara’s first skyscraper (14 stories) in 1959, its convention facility in 1967, a 342-room high-rise addition in 1977 and another 625-room high-rise addition in 1979.

In the mid-1960s, Stern also created a new expansion tower for the Sands Hotel, moving some of its original two-story structures to provide the space. That high-rise project, according to Michel, signaled an end to the low-slung and rambling early hotels for a higher skyline along the Las Vegas Strip.

In the same period, Stern also lifted downtown Las Vegas skyward with a 26-story building for the Mint Hotel, and signaled a major change in the city’s architecture by designing the megalithic triform International Hotel (later the Las Vegas Hilton) near the Convention Center.

Stern followed that with the MGM Grand Hotel in 1971 (later Bally’s), the last of his Strip monuments. He continued, however, to redesign and expand the Sahara, the Riviera and the El Rancho hotels well into the 1980s.

In Reno and Tahoe, he designed Harrah’s and the MGM Grand among others, and for Atlantic City the Showboat and Playboy properties.

Michel wrote that one of Stern’s most fascinating projects was never built: the proposed Las Vegas resort Xanadu, planned by Donald Trump for the site where the Excalibur was later constructed. Trump’s financing fell through, and Stern’s innovative mastaba-shaped complex with a vast atrium and step-back rooms (presaging the later Luxor Hotel) was confined to his architectural drawings now housed at UNLV.

Stern is survived by his wife, Chantal; three sons and one daughter; a sister; and four grandchildren.