If you’ve been around a while, you may recall the “Holiday Casino” on the Las Vegas Strip. Today it’s Harrah’s, and it opened fifty years ago.
The date was July 2, 1973. Once there had been a series of small motels, beginning with the Tumblewood Motel in 1946. Then the 520-room Holiday Inn Center Strip had opened on the site in February 1972. Now there also would be a casino with a steamboat theme. The main operator was Shelby Williams. He was a gaming veteran from Mississippi. He had taken over the Silver Slipper with his wife Claudine and sold it to Howard Hughes. Then he got back into action with the Holiday Casino. He said he wanted to cater to, as he put it, “every man,” not just high-rollers. The casino opened and he later commented, “Gaming officials … said it took us less than two years to get into a financial position most casinos hope to attain in five.” For a decade, their main entertainment attraction was Rocky Sennes’ Wild World of Burlesque.
Williams, his investors, and his staff did it with slot machines and fewer table games. It was a preview of the evolution we would see in a lot of casinos in decades to come. Sadly, Williams didn’t live to see it. He died in 1977. His successor knew her stuff. Yes, her.
Claudine Williams became one of the first, and one of the few, women to run a Strip casino. In 1979, she sold forty percent of the casino to Holiday Inn and kept control of the rest with her fellow investors, led by another Las Vegas legend, William “Wildcat” Morris. In 1980, Holiday Inn bought out Harrah’s. Then Holiday Inn created The Promus Companies to run its casinos.
The early 1980s were a time of expansion. With a twenty-three story tower giving it 991 rooms, it became the world’s largest Holiday Inn. The casino grew, too. In 1983, Williams sold the rest of her ownership interest but remained as chair. There were some major innovations for their time during her tenure. For one, computerized bingo—a reminder of how the casino chip was important, but the computer chip was, too. The Holiday Casino also built an outdoor shopping plaza modeled on Jackson Square in New Orleans.
In 1992 came another change. The ownership group decided to rename the hotel and casino Harrah’s. It was a legendary name, of course: Bill Harrah had built iconic properties in Reno and Lake Tahoe. In 1995, the parent company changed its name to Harrah’s Entertainment. At the Las Vegas resort, several building projects gradually expanded it to more than 2,500 rooms, and it developed a theme combining a Mississippi riverboat and Mardi Gras.
In 2005, Harrah’s Entertainment bought out Caesars Entertainment for more than ten billion dollars. As a result, the old Holiday Inn and Holiday Casino Center Strip became part of an even bigger international gaming corporation. Now the property is owned by Vici Properties, a real estate investment trust, and Caesars Entertainment operates it under a lease agreement. From the Williamses to a big corporation, the story is emblematic of the evolution of the Las Vegas Strip.