Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Where I Stand:

As in 1955, the old gives way to the new

Once again, the old will give way to the new. It is the Las Vegas way, and it works in a city that is barely 68 years old (the opening of the Flamingo started it all).

Most Las Vegans have probably not even visited the Riviera and, unless they do so by Monday, they will have missed an opportunity to catch just a small piece of what Las Vegas used to be like. Admittedly, there is very little about the original Riviera that exists today (other than some loyal employees who have grown up with the place), and there is a strong sense that time has, indeed, passed it by.

That is why it is closing, to make way for a newer Las Vegas and our growing convention business.

But, there was a time when the Riviera was the talk of the town. When it opened in 1955, my father, Hank Greenspun, wrote in his Where I Stand column what he believed the Riviera meant to a growing Las Vegas.

I am reprinting that column so our readers can have a taste of what the Riviera was like and what it meant to those of us who lived here — all 35,000 of us — 60 years ago.

•••

By Hank Greenspun

Going up!

A rather unfamiliar cry in Las Vegas where elevators are about as nonexistent as rocket ships to the moon. I was kind of startled when I heard these words the other night, and sure enough there were actually elevator boys standing in the lobby of the Riviera Hotel soliciting business for these newfangled contraptions that whisk people heavenward.

I was almost tempted to take a ride but decided to share the thrill with my youngsters who have never been out of Las Vegas and are therefore unacquainted with sky-riders. So, the next time we go out to the Strip, it will be with four kids and a box lunch just in case the elevator gets stuck between floors.

Elevators are not the only innovations the nine-story Riviera Hotel has brought to Las Vegas. It has introduced plush, cosmopolitan living to the desert in the finest of taste and simplicity of décor.

From the sign in front of the hotel to the decorations and furnishings inside, elegance is the standard. The dining room would create the same effect of splendor without Liberace, so the piano-playing genius’ brocaded silver tuxedo only helps to gild the lily.

The Riviera went up in the air with the same startling effect on adults that its elevators would have on my kids who have never seen an elevator before. First, there was only desert. In quick succession, there was steel, masonry, plumbing, plastering, painting and landscaping, and there stood a completed hotel that would do credit to any community, including the famed Florida coastline.

If the owners of the Riviera had any skepticism about the success of their new venture, it is now official that they can quiet any fears. They have designed the pattern for the future of Las Vegas.

From here on in, all the new resorts will creep skyward if they are to compete; and the only thing that could surpass the Riviera would be another Fontainebleau, and I suppose it would have to be undertaken by Mason, who built the original in Miami.

Eight-and-a-half-million dollars went into the Riviera’s construction, which is easily twice the amount of any other hotel, and if opening business is a criterion, it should take all of six months to pay it off.

The Riviera has succeeded in establishing a new goal for future builders in Las Vegas to shoot at; whether it will be surpassed is rather doubtful in our generation. However, one thing they already have accomplished: This desert skyscraper has succeeded in making a drab motel of places like the Desert Inn.

Even the doormen in their uniforms and hats, colored and styled after the officers of the French Foreign Legion, provide discrimination that may cause other hotels to start immediate renovation or possibly face the fate of having owners wind up as doormen at the Riviera.

I know very little about the Riviera in Europe or the gambling palaces of Monte Carlo, but of this I can be sure. Never in our history has there ever been such an elegant gambling joint as the new Las Vegas Riviera.

Brian Greenspun is owner, publisher and editor of the Las Vegas Sun.

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