Sarah Feldberg
Seventy-five years is a long time for any hotel to survive, but in Las Vegas, a city where the obsession with reinvention is a key to its identity, the passage of time should perhaps be measured differently. Like dog years (approximately five years of aging to one calendar year), there are Vegas years. I don't have a firm take on the math, but let's just say that 75 years in Sin City are worth at least 100 anywhere else.
Which makes El Cortez's 75th anniversary an even more impressive feat. The downtown Las Vegas hotel and casino, which was built on a dirt floor in 1941 and has run continuously ever since, is on the National Register of Historic Places and still retains much of its original architecture. Physically, the facade of the casino on Fremont and Sixth streets is virtually unchanged, with the exception of the iconic neon sign that was added in 1953.
Alex Epstein
However, behind that familiar exterior, the team at El Cortez is constantly evaluating the property and making calculated changes to entice new visitors even as it honors loyal customers who've been coming back for years. I spoke with executive manager Alex Epstein to talk about the property's history, its evolution and its future.
Q: When El Cortez opened, Las Vegas was a very different place. How did the casino fit into the Vegas landscape?
When the El Cortez was built in 1941, it was one of the first properties to include hotel rooms and dining along with a casino. Photo Credit: Las Vegas News Bureau
A: At that time in 1941, it was actually one of the first to incorporate hotel rooms, restaurant, bar and casino. Other properties had been open that were just a casino or they had a bar attached to it, but never before had there been a resort-type experience in terms of also having guestrooms attached, also having a restaurant [and] also having entertainment. I think El Cortez was a little bit of a predecessor, obviously on a much smaller scale, for what you see today.
Q: How has the property evolved?
A: As you look at the hotel casino, you can kind of see the evolution through the years. You can see the rooms that were built over the garage in the 1960s, the tower that was built in the '80s and it kind of grew out from there. The Cabana Suites are something we did about six years ago, building a boutique hotel that would offer a different kind of room experience for our customers and to usher in a younger, more whimsical clientele. We also built the Jackie Gaughan Parkway, which has been an incredible event space for us. Just this past year we opened Siegel's 1941, a 24-hour restaurant that serves breakfast, lunch and dinner, kind of an homage to [former El Cortez owner] Bugsy Siegel. We're rearranging our entire pit where our table games are, and we're opening and expanding a bar alongside Fremont. Not to be excluded are all the room renovations we've done over the years.
[COO] Mike Nolan likes to joke that we're renovating 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We have a very, very busy engineering team that works very hard to maintain this 75-year-old building. The projects never really end.
Q: Is that openness to renovating and reevaluating what has allowed El Cortez to stay relevant?
A: Absolutely. Not only is it being open to the ideas but having the kind of operations in place where you're able to make swift changes. I think that's one of the biggest benefits of being a small, family-owned property: You have the ability to make a decision and act on it relatively quickly instead of dealing with the bureaucracy and the approval process that other hotels might have to go through. We can see a problem, assess it and try to solve it in the moment.
Q: When you're making changes, how important is it to honor the history even as you're doing updates?
A: It's a daily dialogue that we have internally: How much do we want to nod toward that and recognize it, and how much do we want to break away and be relevant toward the future? I think it's a constant evaluation of what we're offering and the purposes we're offering it. Without any hesitation, we certainly celebrate and broadcast our history and accomplishments and our authenticity. But at the end of the day we are a living and thriving property and we continue to see ourselves evolving into the future.
Q: How do you balance attracting new customers with keeping longtime loyal ones?
A: Our core customers see and feel every little change, whether you expect it or not. Whether it's in signage or any slight pricing change or anything, of course, they notice and have an opinion about it. But at the same time, we find that the changes that we make perhaps trying to entice newer guests or a different group really appeal to everybody. We found that when we designed the Cabana Suites. We thought we were designing a boutique hotel that would appeal to millennials, a newer demographic of people who were coming downtown, and all of our customers loved it, our core customers included