Riviera casino: the Las Vegas Strip high-rise that opened in 1955

The Riviera casino opened on the northern Las Vegas Strip on 20 April 1955. Before the concrete went up, the project was called the Casa Blanca. The investors were mostly from Miami Beach. They hired Roy France and Son, a Miami Beach architecture firm, and Taylor Construction Company, also of Miami. Work started in 1954. The finished hotel was nine storeys and 291 rooms, built for about $8.5 million, with a two-storey wing beside the tower.

That height was the point. Earlier Strip resorts were motor courts: low buildings, parking at the door, a pool, a casino. The Riviera was the first high-rise casino hotel on the Strip, and for a short time the tallest building in the Las Vegas Valley. The Fremont Hotel downtown passed it in 1956. People called the place the Riv. The theme nodded at the French Riviera in the names of rooms and towers, more than in the architecture itself.

Opening night

Liberace was the opening headliner. He cut the ribbon and became the first resident performer, in a dinner theatre called the Clover Room. Histories of the opening put his pay at $50,000 a week, a record for a Las Vegas act at the time. Actress Joan Crawford was among the opening guests. The resort had arrived in the same season as two other new Strip hotels, the Dunes and the Royal Nevada, and locals already worried the town had built too many rooms.

The wider map of that decade is in Las Vegas history. A patterned floor from later years is a different subject, in casino carpet. Harpo Marx and Gummo Marx were among the licensed partners at the start. The early books were bad. Historians describe hidden mob interest, including suspicions around Chicago, and a Miami group that did not know how to run a casino. Within the first years Gus Greenbaum, from the Flamingo, leased the operation.

Gus Greenbaum had run the Flamingo. He came out of retirement to run the Riviera, and the usual telling is that Chicago figures pressed him to do it. His tenure ended in violence away from the Strip. In December 1958 he and his wife were murdered in their home in Phoenix. Accounts tie the killing to his casino role and to money missing from the operation. Ben Goffstein followed him as president. The estate's remaining stake in the hotel was bought out in the early 1960s.

The resort kept adding rooms. A six-storey addition finished in 1960. A 12-storey wing followed in 1966. In the late 1960s a new ownership group, including bankers E. Parry Thomas and Jerome Mack, bought the property. A proposed sale to Parvin-Dohrmann, which already had interests in other Las Vegas casinos, was blocked by the Gaming Control Board. Edward Torres managed the resort for the group that held it.

Dean Martin

Dean Martin's name is often attached to the Riviera, and the dates that are solid come later than opening night. He was hired in 1969 to play the showroom and was given a 10 percent interest in the hotel. He left in 1972 after Torres would not cut the schedule from two shows a night to one. The Riviera bought his shares back. That is a documented engagement and a small ownership stake, not a founding role. Liberace, not Martin, opened the room in 1955.

Orson Welles played the Riviera in 1956. Barbra Streisand opened for Liberace there in 1963. The Clover Room had been renamed the Versailles Theatre in 1960. None of those contracts made the hotel the Sands. It was a working Strip resort with a tall tower, in a decade when several rivals could say the same.

In 1973 AITS Inc., a Boston travel company controlled by Meshulam Riklis, bought the Riviera for $60 million. Riklis was the majority owner. A 17-storey tower, later called the Monte Carlo, opened in 1975. The early 1980s were harder. Recession and new Atlantic City casinos hurt the Strip's older rooms. The Riviera filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 1983.

Riklis put in money to keep the doors open and brought in Jeffrey Silver to change the pitch. Silver aimed the marketing at middle-income and working guests rather than at a short list of high rollers. In 1984 the Riviera put a Burger King on the property, widely described as the first fast-food chain outlet inside a Strip resort. The hotel came out of bankruptcy in 1985. The phrase people used for this shift, the "Burger King revolution," was really a customer shift: buffets, familiar brands, and volume, on a campus that was no longer new.

Splash, Crazy Girls, and a second bankruptcy

Splash opened in 1985, with dancers, motorcycle stunts, and a water tank. Crazy Girls, a topless revue, opened in 1987 and stayed until the hotel closed. Frank Marino's An Evening at La Cage ran from 1985 to 2009.

An expansion from 1988 to 1990 added the 24-storey Monaco tower, about 1,000 rooms, and a block-long neon facade on the Strip. The project went over budget. A construction fire in 1989 damaged a new casino area. The parent company filed for Chapter 11 again in 1991 and emerged in 1993 as Riviera Holdings Corporation, owned by its secured creditors. Riklis was out. Convention space, expanded in the late 1990s, helped the middle-market model limp through the next decade. By the end, the resort had 2,075 rooms and on the order of 100,000 square feet of casino.

The Riviera and the Stardust are easy to tangle because both were north-Strip resorts from the 1950s, both had mob-era stories, and both are gone. They were not the same building, and they did not share a site. The Stardust opened on 2 July 1958 and was imploded in 2007. Its land is where Resorts World Las Vegas later opened. The Riviera stood at 2901 South Las Vegas Boulevard until 2015. The Stardust casino guide has the skim, Frank Rosenthal, and the film that fictionalised that casino.

The film connection is the other mix-up. Martin Scorsese's Casino (1995) uses the Stardust as its real-world model and was filmed in part at the Riviera. A scene shot in one hotel is not a deed to the other hotel's history. Ocean's 11 (1960) also used the Riviera. If you remember neon, a marquee, and a film crew, check which resort the story is actually about before you repeat it.

The name travelled

Riviera Holdings opened a second property, the Riviera Black Hawk, in Colorado in 2000, and kept it for more than a decade. That was a reuse of the brand, not a second life for the 1955 tower. Other hotels and later online brands have used the word Riviera as well. This page is only the Las Vegas Strip resort that opened in 1955 and closed in 2015. If a site or a small-town casino uses the name now, it is not this building.

Neighbours closed: the Westward Ho, the Stardust, the New Frontier. Echelon and Fontainebleau, which were supposed to refill the neighbourhood, stalled in the financial crisis. Riviera Holdings filed for Chapter 11 again in 2010 and came out with Starwood Capital as the main owner. Paragon Gaming took casino operations in 2013. Buyers flinched at the renovation bill.

In February 2015 the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority voted to buy the 26-acre Riviera from Riviera Holdings. The agency wanted the land for an expansion of the Las Vegas Convention Center, next door in practical terms. Published accounts differ on the exact dollar figure, so this guide will not pick one. The authority took ownership and leased the hotel back to Paragon until the doors shut.

The Riviera closed shortly after noon on 4 May 2015, two weeks after its 60th anniversary. About a thousand people worked there. A liquidation sale followed. Some slot machines went to downtown casinos. Petitions asked the county to save the building. Architects and critics argued about the mirrored facade, the chandeliers, and the simple fact that the 1955 wing was among the oldest resort structures left on the Strip. The authority's reply was economic: the convention expansion needed the ground.

Two implosions

Asbestos, and contaminated soil near old fuel tanks, slowed the work. Controlled Demolition brought down the 24-storey Monaco tower on 14 June 2016, with a crowd and fireworks. On 16 August 2016 the Monte Carlo tower, the 12-storey wing, and the billboard facade came down with less ceremony. Neon letters from the facade were saved, and some went to the Neon Museum in Las Vegas.

The convention center's West Hall later rose on the eastern part of the land. The Strip-front acres were sold on in later years and are a real-estate story of their own. Nothing you can walk into today is the 1955 Riviera. Photographs, a few signs, and the convention campus are what the address became.

A short timeline keeps the owners straight:

The Riviera matters for a specific reason, smaller than the myth of a golden age. It proved a high-rise could stand on the Strip, then spent sixty years being renovated, bankrupted, and repositioned rather than replaced. Most of its famous neighbours were imploded sooner. Survival was the unusual part, and survival came from convention space and a middle-market floor, not from being the most glamorous room in town.

The resort never held the Sands' place in the Rat Pack years. It was a solid hotel that lasted. The skim story you may be thinking of is the Stardust's. The Riviera's early years had their own hidden-ownership suspicions, and then decades of ordinary, often struggling, licensed operation.

Where to put it in the longer history

European gambling houses are centuries older. The oldest casino guide is the right page for Venice and the spa towns. The history of gambling is the wide timeline, from bones and dice to online play. A single gambler's run at modern Las Vegas tables, which has nothing to do with this hotel's deed, is Archie Karas. Use those pages instead of asking the Riviera to stand for every casino story.

The building is gone. The games people played inside it were the usual ones: slots, blackjack, craps, roulette, with a house edge on the timely bets and a surveillance department that existed because the cash was real. If you want a wheel whose return is written down in advance, PVPspinArena's roulette is a 15-slot game that pays 14/15, a 6.67% edge, between players and the published rules. It is not a revival of the Riviera, and it is gambling for adults, 18+. The resort's history lives in the photographs and in the Casino knowledge topic, not in a tower you can still book.

See also the Black Book.