Caesars Palace (1966) & Jay Sarno: How Greco-Roman Fantasy Reinvented the Las Vegas Strip

How Did Jay Sarno, Kirk Kerkorian, and the Teamsters Pension Fund Finance Caesars Palace?

Born in St. Joseph, Missouri, in 1922, tile contractor turned hospitality impresario Jay Sarno and his Indiana University roommate Stanley Mallin built a fortune in the late 1950s developing mid-scale Cabana Motor Hotels in Atlanta, Dallas, and Palo Alto using low-interest mortgages from the Teamsters Central States, Southeast and Southwest Areas Pension Fund. Visiting Palo Alto's Roman-columned Cabana, Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa and fund gatekeeper Allen Dorfman backed Sarno's ambition to build a full-scale classical resort in Las Vegas, where no new luxury property had opened on the Strip since the Stardust in 1958 and the Aladdin remodel had stalled.

In 1962, aviation entrepreneur Kirk Kerkorian had paid $960,000 for eighty acres along the west side of Las Vegas Boulevard just north of Flamingo Road. Rather than sell outright, Kerkorian leased thirty-four acres to Sarno's syndicate in 1964 under a lucrative ground lease paying $4 million in base rent plus 15 percent of gross casino revenue, netting Kerkorian more than $9 million before he sold the underlying parcel to Caesars in 1968 for another $5 million, seeding his later purchase of MGM.

Backed by an initial $10.6 million Teamsters Pension Fund commitment (later expanded as finishes escalated toward $24–$25 million) and joined by seasoned casino executives Nate Jacobson and Harry L. Lewis, Sarno staged the ceremonial groundbreaking on January 26, 1965, preserved in the Caesars Palace construction archive.

How Did Architect Melvin Grossman Design Caesars Palace Without an Apostrophe?

To translate imperial Rome into concrete and neon without looking like a dusty museum, Sarno hired Melvin Grossman, architect of Miami Beach's curvaceous Deauville and Americana resort hotels, alongside showroom designer Homer Rissman and interior decorators who mixed classical statuary with mid-century Space Age glamour. Instead of pushing the casino wall right to the highway curb like Downtown clubs, Grossman recessed the sweeping fourteen-story, 680-room curved Roman Tower 435 feet west of Las Vegas Boulevard.

Motorists turning off Highway 91 glided along twin entry drives lined by eighteen towering water plumes, imported fifty-foot Italian cypresses, and gleaming white Carrara marble replicas carved in Italy, including the Winged Victory of Samothrace, Giambologna's Rape of the Sabine Women, Michelangelo's David, and a twenty-foot statue of Augustus Caesar raising his hand beside the roadside marquee. When Yale architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour surveyed the Strip in 1968 for Learning from Las Vegas, they singled out Caesars' colonnaded porte-cochere and statuary plaza as a landmark fusion of Bernini's St. Peter's Square and 55-mph automobile choreography.

Inside the oblong domed casino, engineered without interior columns so surveillance catwalks and gamblers enjoyed unbroken sightlines, Sarno enforced his famous grammatical edict: no apostrophe in Caesars Palace. 'This isn't the palace of one Caesar,' Sarno told copywriters and sign fabricators. 'Every guest who walks through those doors is a Caesar.'

What Happened at the $1 Million August 1966 Bacchanal and Evel Knievel's 1967 Fountain Crash?

Beginning Friday, August 5, 1966, Sarno threw a three-day, $1 million invitation-only opening party for 1,800 guests that became instant Strip legend. Waiters poured 50,000 glasses of imported Ukrainian champagne, the single largest private champagne order in U.S. history to that date, alongside two tons of filet mignon and 300 pounds of Maryland crabmeat. Cocktail servers dressed in asymmetric short white 'Goddess' tunics and Greco-Roman wigs greeted bettors with 'Welcome to Caesars Palace, I am your slave,' while diners in the Bacchanal Room received multi-course feasts accompanied by individual wine-goddess attendants. Andy Williams headlined the 800-seat domed Circus Maximus showroom while Xavier Cugat and twenty-five-year-old Charo packed the Nero's Nook lounge.

Sixteen months later, an obscure Montana motorcycle daredevil named Robert Craig 'Evel' Knievel watched a Caesars matchbook or television spot and telephoned Sarno repeatedly, posing in disguised voices as three separate lawyers and sports agents, until Sarno agreed to let him jump the 141-foot expanse of the north entry fountains on New Year's Eve, December 31, 1967. Riding a heavy 500cc Triumph Bonneville T120 TT before live cameras hired with his last funds (and later sold to ABC's Wide World of Sports), Knievel cleared the water jets but lost power at takeoff, slamming his rear wheel onto the lip of the safety-van landing ramp.

Wrenched violently over the handlebars, Knievel skidded across the asphalt parking lot, crushing his pelvis and femur and fracturing his hip, wrist, and both ankles. Hospitalized for roughly twenty-nine days at Southern Nevada Memorial Hospital, a stay Knievel later embellished in interviews into a legendary 'twenty-nine-day coma', he emerged as an international pop-culture sensation while making Caesars' fountains famous in tens of millions of living rooms.

How Did Lum's 1969 Buyout and Caesars Outdoor Stadium Create the Mecca of Championship Boxing?

Sarno's lavish comps and federal organized-crime scrutiny of silent casino skimming soon strained his partnership. After opening his family-oriented circus-tent casino Circus Circus down the street in October 1968, Sarno and Mallin sold Caesars Palace in September 1969 for $60 million to Clifford and Stuart Perlman, owners of the Miami-based Lum's hot-dog restaurant chain. Renamed Caesars World in 1971, the Perlmans expanded tower capacity and discovered that staging mega-events outdoors on the scorching asphalt behind the hotel attracted the wealthiest high-roller baccarat whales on earth.

Constructing modular 15,000-to-25,000-seat open-air grandstands on the tennis courts and north parking lot, Caesars Outdoor Sports Pavilion hosted the defining prizefights of the 1980s, along with two FIA Formula One World Championship races, the 1981 and 1982 Caesars Palace Grand Prix, run on a temporary 2.26-mile counter-clockwise circuit laid across the west parking lot.

How Did the 1992 Forum Shops and Six-Tower Expansions Keep Caesars Palace at the Center of the Strip?

When Steve Wynn opened The Mirage immediately north of Caesars' parking lot in November 1989, documented in the Mirage archival collection, industry analysts predicted that Mel Grossman's twenty-three-year-old Roman property would lose luxury foot traffic. Instead, Caesars World partnered with shopping-center developer Sheldon Gordon and thematic designer Terry Dougall to unveil The Forum Shops at Caesars in May 1992.

Designed as an indoor Via Appia cobble streetscape featuring animatronic Festival Fountain statues and a vaulted sky-painted ceiling whose computerized lighting cycled from Mediterranean dawn to starlit dusk every hour, the 250,000-square-foot wing generated more than $1,200 to $1,400 in annual sales per square foot, the highest retail productivity of any mall in the United States, and proved that non-gaming luxury retail could rival casino drop.

Across six decades, management added five additional hotel wings around Grossman's original 1966 curved building (today remodeled as the Julius Tower): the Centurion Tower (1970, later Nobu Hotel), Forum Tower (1979), Palace Tower (1998), Augustus Tower (2005), and Octavius Tower (2012), plus the 4,100-seat Colosseum built in March 2003 specifically for Celine Dion's A New Day... residency, carrying Jay Sarno's plural palace of Caesars intact into the twenty-first century.