Sahara Hotel & Casino History (1952): From Milton Prell's Club Bingo & Del Webb to Louis Prima's Casbar Lounge

How Did Milton Prell's 1947 Club Bingo Evolve into the 1952 Hotel Sahara?

Born in Butte, Montana, former jeweler and Los Angeles 331 Club operator Milton Prell arrived in Southern Nevada right after World War II convinced that everyday middle-class motorists wanted friendlier, less intimidating action than Downtown sawdust joints or Bugsy Siegel's troubled Flamingo. Partnering with Al Winter as Prewin Inc., Prell purchased a year-old roadside restaurant built in 1946 by M.D. Close on the southeast corner of Highway 91 and San Francisco Street (later renamed Sahara Avenue), directly opposite Thomas Hull's pioneering 1941 El Rancho Vegas.

On July 24, 1947, Prell and Winter opened Club Bingo, featuring a 300-seat bingo auditorium alongside slot machines and low-limit craps and blackjack tables. Documented in the Sahara & Club Bingo archival collection, Club Bingo generated such brisk cash returns from locals and California highway drivers that Prell assembled thirty-five investment partners in early 1952 to replace the roadhouse with the Strip's sixth full-scale resort hotel.

To build the 240-room property on a tight six-month schedule without cost overruns, Prell approached Phoenix builder Del E. Webb, whose firm had survived building Siegel's Flamingo in 1946. Short on liquid cash to cover Webb's general-contracting fee, Prell offered Webb a 20 percent equity stake in the resort, launching Del E. Webb's transformation from cautious Arizona carpenter into one of Nevada's earliest corporate casino owners. Designed by supervising architect Max Maltzman, the $5.5 million Hotel Sahara opened on October 7, 1952 with Broadway song-and-dance star Ray Bolger headlining the 600-seat Congo Room.

What Made the Sahara's Plaster Camel Caravan and 222-Foot YESCO Minaret Sign Landmarks of Highway 91?

To set the Sahara apart from the Western log beams of El Rancho Vegas and the Hotel Last Frontier across the highway, Prell hired Los Angeles interior designer and former Hollywood movie stuntman Ragnar C. Qvale to execute an oasis caravan motif. Beneath scalloped Moorish arches and gilded onion domes, Qvale staged life-size painted plaster and fiberglass dromedary camels and robed nomad figures resting under date palms right beside the circular porte-cochere driveway.

Those plaster camels quickly became a mandatory Las Vegas News Bureau publicity stop: throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Hollywood guests from Marlene Dietrich and Abbott & Costello to Ronald Reagan and Johnny Carson posed astride the Sahara camels for hometown newspaper wire photos. Out along the curb, the property's original geometric polygon marquee gave way in 1978 to an engineering marvel designed by Young Electric Sign Company (YESCO) art director Rudy Crisostomo: a 222-foot-tall freestanding steel minaret-and-camel pylon sign weighing more than 190 tons, briefly ranking as the world's tallest freestanding sign until dismantled after the 2011 closure.

How Did Louis Prima, Keely Smith, and Sam Butera Turn the Casbar Lounge into the Hottest Stage in Vegas?

In the autumn of 1954, forty-three-year-old New Orleans jazz trumpeter and bandleader Louis Prima found himself nearly broke after big-band swing fell out of fashion. Sahara entertainment director Bill Miller, a former talent agent who understood late-night gambler psychology, offered Prima, his twenty-two-year-old wife Keely Smith, and hard-blowing New Orleans tenor saxophonist Sam Butera & The Witnesses a modest two-week trial contract at roughly $2,500 to $3,000 per week inside the Casbar Theatre, an unpartitioned lounge opening directly onto the Sahara casino pit.

Opening in November 1954, the act detonated every sedate cocktail-piano rule in Las Vegas. Playing five forty-five-minute sets nightly between midnight and 5:00 a.m. with no cover charge, Prima leaped around the tiny stage singing 'Just a Gigolo / I Ain't Got Nobody' and trading double-entendre banter while Butera honked rhythm-and-blues riffs and Smith stood motionless in evening gowns delivering deadpan side-eye and crystalline vocals on 'That Old Black Magic', which won a Grammy Award at the inaugural 1959 ceremony.

Within weeks, headliners from rival Strip showrooms (Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Judy Garland, and Spencer Tracy) poured into the Casbar Lounge after their own midnight shows wrapped at 1:30 a.m., turning the Sahara casino pit into an all-night celebrity party and inspiring Miller to sign Don Rickles, Buddy Hackett, and Johnny Cash. Prima and Smith's live Capitol Records LPs recorded on the Casbar stage turned the zero-cover casino lounge into a distinct American musical genre.

What Happened When Del Webb Expanded the Sahara and Hosted The Beatles in August 1964?

While Milton Prell expanded downtown to open The Mint in 1957 and later remodeled the Tallyho into the Aladdin, Del E. Webb's publicly traded construction company bought full control of the Sahara in August–September 1961 in a $25 million stock transaction, five years before Howard Hughes popularized corporate Strip ownership. Having already added architect Martin Stern Jr.'s fourteen-story, 400-room North Tower in 1960, Webb commissioned Stern to erect a twenty-four-story, 250-foot Skyscraper Tower in 1963, lifting capacity to 1,000 rooms and making the Sahara the tallest building in Nevada.

On August 19, 1964, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr landed at McCarran Field during their first North American tour and checked into the entire top floor of that new twenty-four-story Sahara Tower ahead of two sold-out August 20 concerts (4:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m.) for 16,800 screaming fans at the nearby Las Vegas Convention Center, paid for by a $25,000 guarantee arranged through Sahara executives. Because thousands of teenagers besieged the Sahara lobby across the street from the burned ruins of El Rancho Vegas, hotel security barred the Fab Four from walking onto the casino floor; instead, Sahara pit bosses wheeled two slot machines and dispatched a uniformed blackjack dealer straight up to Suite 2345 so the band could gamble until dawn.

Beginning Labor Day weekend in September 1973, the Sahara's Congo Room and cavernous Space Center convention hall also became the national television broadcast headquarters for Jerry Lewis's twenty-one-and-a-half-hour Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA) Telethon, anchoring the live telecast across most years through 1995.

Why Did the Sahara Close in 2011, Become SLS Las Vegas, and Restore Its Historic Name in 2019?

After Del Webb's debt-burdened gaming division sold the Sahara in 1982 for $50 million to Paul Lowden's Sahara Resorts, Circus Circus co-founder William G. 'Bill' Bennett purchased the aging landmark in 1995 for $193 million. Between 1996 and 2000, Bennett added a grand Moroccan-domed porte-cochere, the Tangier Tower, a NASCAR-themed restaurant complex, and Speed – The Ride, an electromagnetic launch roller coaster that blasted riders out through the front facade and 224 feet straight up a vertical spike along Las Vegas Boulevard.

When the 2008 financial crash stalled neighboring north-Strip megaresorts Fontainebleau and Echelon Place, foot traffic above Wynn Las Vegas withered. New owners sbe Entertainment (led by Sam Nazarian) and Stockbridge Real Estate shuttered the fifty-nine-year-old Sahara at 2:00 p.m. on May 16, 2011, auctioning off its camel lamps and stained glass before spending $415 million with French designer Philippe Starck to reopen the gutted towers on August 23, 2014 as boutique-nightlife resort SLS Las Vegas.

Without convention scale or nostalgia appeal, SLS struggled financially until Reno- and Los Angeles-based billionaire Alex Meruelo acquired the property in April 2018. Investing $150 million into suite upgrades, a redesigned casino floor, and sleek modern desert styling, Meruelo retired the SLS moniker and officially restored the historic Sahara Las Vegas name on August 29, 2019, preserving Martin Stern Jr.'s 1960 and 1963 towers (now the Blanca and Alexandria/Marra wings) on the exact 1947 Club Bingo corner.