Sands Hotel and Casino

Early history performed at the Sands on its opening night The LaRue Restaurant was established in December 1950 by Billy Wilkerson. were involved in the financing of Sands and had shares in it. Lansky and his mob assumed ownership of the Flamingo Hotel after the murder of Bugsy Siegel in 1947, and Lansky and New York mobster Frank Costello also had business interests in the Thunderbird Hotel and El Cortez Club in Downtown Las Vegas. Construction began on Sands Hotel in early 1952, built to a design by Wayne McAllister. Trousdale Construction Company of Los Angeles was the general contractor. Initially the Nevada Tax Commission rejected Freedman's request for a gambling license due to his connections with known criminals. Freedman had initially intended naming the hotel "Holiday Inn" after the film of the same name starring Bing Crosby, but after noticing that his socks became so full of sand decided to name it Sands. The tag line would be "A Place in the Sun", named after a recently released film starring Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor, and quite suitable to the hot desert location of Las Vegas. The hotel was opened on December 15, 1952, as a casino with 200 rooms, and was established less than three months after the opening of another prominent landmark, Sahara Hotel and Casino. The opening was widely publicized, and the hotel was visited by some 12,000 people within a few hours. At the inauguration were 146 journalists and special guests such as Arlene Dahl, Fernando Lamas, Esther Williams, and Terry Moore. Every guest was given a Chamois bag with silver dollars, and Sands ended up losing $200,000 within the first eight hours. Danny Thomas, Jimmy McHugh and the Copa Girls, labelled "the most beautiful girls in the world", performed in the Copa Room on opening night, and Ray Sinatra and his Orchestra were the initial house band. Thomas was hired to perform for the first two weeks, but strained his voice on the second night and developed laryngitis, and was replaced with performers such as Jimmy Durante, Frankie Laine, Jane Powell, the Ritz Brothers, and Ray Anthony. Jack Entratter, who was formerly in charge of the New York nightclub, the Copacabana, became the hotel's manager. Entratter made many show business friends during his time at the nightclub; he was able to use these connections to sign performers for the Sands Copa Room. Entratter was also able to offer entertainers an additional incentive to perform at the Sands. Headlining stars received "points", or a percentage of ownership in the hotel and casino. Entratter's personally selected "Copa Girls" wore $12,000 worth of costumes on the hotel's opening night; this surpassed the salary of the Copa Room's star, Danny Thomas. In the early years, Freedman and his wife Carolyn were one of its attractions, wearing "matching white, leather outfits, replete with identical cowboy boots and hats". Freedman offered Carolyn's father Nathan a 5% stake in Sands but he declined the offer. The Rat Pack and racial policy with Jack Entratter in 1960 Lansky and Costello brought the Sands to Frank Sinatra's attention, and he began staying at the hotel and gambling there during breaks from Hollywood, though some sources state that he was not a hardcore gambler. Sinatra earned a notoriety for "keeping his winnings and ignoring his gambling losses", but the mobsters running the hotel were not too concerned because Sinatra was great for business. He made his debut performing at the hotel on October 4, 1953, after an invitation by the manager Jack Entratter. Sinatra typically played at Sands three times a year, sometimes a two-week stint, which "brought in the big rollers, a lot of oil money from Texas". The big rollers left Vegas when Sinatra did, and other performers were reluctant to perform after him, feeling intimidated. Entratter replaced Freedman as the president of the Sands Hotel following his death from heart surgery on January 20, 1958. Freedman's last wife Sadie subsequently lived in a suite in the Belmont Park wing into the mid-1960s until her death. Sinatra, who had attempted to buy a share in the hotel soon after first visiting in 1953, but was denied by the Nevada Tax Commission, was now granted permission to buy a share in the hotel, due to his phenomenal impact upon business in Las Vegas. His share, variously described as from 2 to 9%, aided Freedman's wife in paying off her husband's gambling debts. In 1955, limited integration came to heavily segregated Las Vegas when the Sands first allowed Nat King Cole to stay at the hotel and perform. Later history performing at the Sands in January 1956 When Howard Hughes purchased the hotel in the mid-1960s for $14.6 million, Fuming, Sinatra began what The Los Angeles Times describes as a "weekend-long tirade" against the "hotel's management, employees and security forces." The FBI report says the incident began when Mia Farrow lost $20,000 at the Sands casino. Sinatra bought $50,000 in chips and made an attempt to win the money back. He lost this sum within a short period of time. Sinatra then asked for credit, which was denied. At this time, some 30% of the performers at Sands were Italian Americans. Frank Gagliardi became the drummer for the house orchestra in 1964, starting a twelve-year tenure. In 1968, Hughes stated that he intended to expand Sands into a 4,000-room resort, but his plans did not materialize. and the property became known as the MGM Sands. The next year, MGM sold it for $110 million to Las Vegas Sands, a new company formed by the owners of The Interface Group, including Sheldon Adelson, Richard Katzeff, Ted Cutler, Irwin Chafetz and Jordan Shapiro. The same year, it was licensed by the Nevada Gaming Commission, and Adelson became a casino magnate. In the early 1990s, Adelson built the Sands Expo, a convention centre. it was imploded and demolished, much to the dismay of longtime employees and sentimentalists. Footage of the demolition also appeared in the closing credits of The Cooler. The climactic plane crash in 1997's Con Air ended with the aircraft crashing into the soon-to-be-demolished Sands' lobby. On May 3, 1999, the new $1.5 billion megaresort The Venetian opened where the Sands had formerly been, a 35-story hotel with 3,036 rooms, covering an area of . It became the largest AAA Five-Diamond landmark in North America. ==Architecture==

Wayne McAllister design, 1952 Wayne McAllister designed the original $5.5 million Sands Hotel, an exotic-looking terracotta red-painted modern hotel with a prominent porte cochère at the front, surrounded by a zig-zag wall ornamented with tiled planters. The hotel is arguably most associated with its high sign, made iconic with photographs of the Rat Pack standing underneath it. The name "Sands", written in elegant italics, featured a high letter "S", and the name was sprawled across an egg crate grill, cantilevered from a pillar. The sign was receptive to the light and shadow of the desert, and during night time it was lit up, glowing neon red. It was the tallest sign on the strip for a number of years. Beneath "Sands" was the tagline "A Place in the Sun", written in smaller capital letters. Below that was the billing of the names of the performers appearing at Sands, very often photographed displaying names such as Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Sammy Davis Jr. and Red Skelton in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Author Alan Hess wrote that the "sleek Modernism of the Sands leaped past the Flamingo to set a higher standard of sophistication for Las Vegas. For the first time, the sign was an integral part of the architectural design." The porte-cochère of the hotel featured three great sharp-edged pillars jutting out in front of the glass-fronted building, angling down into the ground, which resembled fins. The two-story glass walled entry was bordered by a wall of imported Italian marble, and above the entrance area was a horizontal plane with copper lights suspended from the beams. The Garden Room restaurant overlooked the hotel's pool and landscaped grounds. In 1963, a new bedroom building, named the Aqueduct, was constructed. The Aqueduct was crescent shaped and was three storeys high, 275' long, and '70 wide. The architect of the new block was Julius Gabrielle, and furnishings were provided by the Albert Parvin Company of Los Angeles. Dick Wells, a Parvin employee, designed the suites. Martin Stern rebuild, 1964 In 1963, Martin Stern Jr. was hired to design a major overhaul of the hotel. Stern's plan amounted to an almost total rebuild of the main building and erased most of the defining features of McAllister's original design. To expand the main building, the Arlington and Belmont blocks were lifted and moved southwards. Stern's plans were completed by the fall of 1964. The rebuild included the addition of a convention hall, an entrance rotunda, new restaurants, and a 17-storey tower. Stern's design employed a prominent arch motif in the tower and the hotel façade. Construction of the tower commenced in late 1965, Louis Armstrong, Jerry Lee Lewis, Patti Page, French singer Edith Piaf, Nat King Cole, Robert Merrill, Wayne Newton, Red Skelton, and "The Copa Girls". Hollywood celebrities such as Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, Elizabeth Taylor, Yul Brynner, Kirk Douglas, Lucille Ball and Rosalind Russell were often photographed enjoying the headline acts. A number of notable albums were recorded in the Copa Room. Among them are Dean Martin's Live At The Sands – An Evening of Music, Laughter and Hard Liquor, Frank Sinatra's Sinatra at the Sands, and Sammy Davis, Jr.'s ''The Sounds of '66 and That's All!. The Rat Pack: Live at the Sands, a CD released in 2001, features Martin, Sinatra and Davis in a live performance at the hotel recorded in September 1963. Live at the Sands'' is an album featuring Mary Wilson, formerly of The Supremes. Morrissey's B-side track, "At Amber" (1990), takes place at the Sands Hotel, and recounts its by-then aging and somewhat seedy atmosphere. Much of the musical success of the Copa Room is credited to the room's band leader and musical conductor Antonio Morelli. Morelli not only acted as the band leader and musical conductor for the Copa Room during the hotel's Rat Pack heyday in the 1950s and 1960s, but he also served in that role on hundreds of recorded albums by those same entertainers who graced the stage of the Copa. Often the festivities would carry over after hours to Morrelli's home in Las Vegas, nicknamed "The Morelli House", which was eventually relocated and sanctioned an historical landmark by the State of Nevada. Silver Queen Lounge The Silver Queen Lounge was another performing venue at Sands, with nightly acts starting at 5 pm and running until 6 am. It was particularly popular with the emerging rock 'n' roll crowd. The Sands is where Freddie Bell and the Bell Boys performed the rock 'n' roll-song "Hound Dog", seen by Elvis Presley. After Presley saw that performance at The Sands, he decided to record the song himself, and it became a hit for him. Roberta Linn and the Melodaires and Gene Vincent were also regular performers. ==See also==