History
1960; Frank Carroll buys 22 acres (8.9 ha) lot at the corner of Convention Center Drive and Paradise Road in Paradise, Nevada.
With a $3,000,000 loan from the Appliance Buyers Credit Corporation, Carroll and his group hired John W. Jamieson of Tustin, California to design the tower and Edward Hendricks of Los Angeles was contracted to oversee its construction. The original plan was to build a 15 story tower, the tallest in Nevada. This was increased to 31 stories when The Mint hotel downtown decided to add more floors to its tower to claim the height record. In the end, the title went to Landmark.
In December 1962, Carroll ran out of funding. His creditors refused to lend him additional money to complete the tower and work halted. The tower sat 80% complete - an empty shell.
In 1966, after four years of dormancy, the Teamsters Union Pension Fund awarded Carroll $5.5 million to complete the Landmark. Work resumed and the tower was completed by early 1967. Landmark announced the opening of its main showroom and lounges on New Year's Eve, 1967 but due to lack of funding it did not open on time.
The Carrolls expected to have the hotel open in April 1968, however a February edition of the Las Vegas Review Journal noted that the hotel had yet to apply for a gaming license.
On January 17, 1969, reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes purchased the Landmark and agreed to pay off the nearly three dozen creditors and contractors Frank Carroll owed money to. Unlike Hughes' other Las Vegas hotels, Landmark had yet to be opened. This allowed Hughes to make all design decisions from room decor to employee uniforms.
Finally, after eight years in the construction phase, The Landmark Hotel & Casino opened on July 1, 1969 with a celebration of 500 invited guests and Danny Thomas headlining the main showroom. Many top performers, such as Liberace, George Burns, Pat Cooper, and Phyllis Diller have performed at the hotel. The hype was short lived when it became apparent that Landmark was not bringing in much profit.
Throughout the 1970s, continuing financial troubles and bad publicity plagued Landmark. In 1970 Hughes fled Las Vegas, leaving control of his hotels to his company, Summa Corp. Landmark reported a loss of $5.9 million that year. In 1974, William G. Bennett and William Pennington made an offer to buy the Landmark but every time they came close to a deal, Hughes raised the price. They bought Circus Circus instead. On July 15, 1977, Carbon monoxide gas leaked into the hotel's air conditioning system killing 1 guest and injuring 138 others. This also caused a power failure and was found to be the result of flooding in the sub-basement.
By the late 1970s, The Landmark was in major financial trouble. Summa Corp. began selling off its hotel properties, and the Landmark was at the top of the list. Ed and Zula Wolfram of Grand Rapids, Ohio purchased the Landmark from Summa Corp. They had little success in turning the troubled hotel around. In 1982, Ed Wolfram was convicted of embezzling $47 million from his Toledo brokerage firm, Bell & Beckwith. The Landmark was seized and put up for sale.In 1983, William Morris - a Las Vegas native - purchased the hotel with plans to breathe life back into it. He used "junk bonds" from Wall Street to finance a major renovation. During an extensive exterior renovation, new red stripes were added along the windows running up the tower and the roof was painted red to match. The entrance had red-lit outriggers added and a new side entrance was added to the casino. Although these were nice visual additions, the rooms remained untouched which contributed to the hotel's eventual downfall. The hotel was renamed "The NEW Landmark".
Even though the hotel failed to bring in much profit, it made enough to remain open throughout the 1980s, but with the opening of the city's first mega-resort, The Mirage, in 1989, The Landmark's fate was sealed. Without the money necessary to renovate the rooms and certainly not enough to pay the creditors, The Landmark closed her doors in August 1990. In June 1991, The hotel's contents were liquidated via an on-site, public sale conducted by NCL/National Content Liquidators, Inc. The hotel sat empty for 2 years until, in 1993, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (which owns the Las Vegas Convention Center across the street) bought the Landmark for $16.7 million. A year-long debate followed within the L.V.C.V.A. about the fate of the aged and run-down hotel. Some wanted to make the necessary repairs and re-open it to house convention attendees. Others wanted to demolish the buildings to add 2,000 much-needed parking spaces for the Convention Center. In the end, after much protest, it was decided that the Landmark would be demolished.
Shortly after the announcement of the hotel's pending destruction was made, a motion was filed by several historical preservation groups to have the tower declared a historical landmark thereby preventing the L.V.C.V.A. from destroying or modifying it. In the end, the court ruled in favor of the L.V.C.V.A.
In mid-1994, AB-Haz Environmental began removing asbestos insulation from the Landmark. The company was cited for violating air emission standards during the removal. AB-Haz signed a settlement in which the company agreed to pay an $18,000 fine.
In early 1995, Maryland-based Controlled Demolition, Inc. and California-based Iconco Inc., began clearing the property and prepping the tower with 100 pounds of explosives. The casino, shops, and room wings were cleared away leaving only the gutted tower.
At 5:35AM on November 7, 1995, the Landmark was demolished in seventeen seconds. The demolition was filmed and used in Mars Attacks!.
Today, the property which once housed the Landmark is a 2000 space parking lot for the Las Vegas Convention Center.
Read more about this topic: The Landmark Hotel And Casino
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