Fire Guts Proposed Las Vegas Casino Site Where Historic Nightclub Stood
A firing on William Ashley Sunday nighttime ravaged an abandoned but historical edifice on Las Vegas’ Historic Westside. The building, at 600 Rebecca West Andrew Jackson Avenue at the crossway of F Street, was most late the Yeddo Casino but was originally the storied Ithiel Town Tavern.
This is land site where Beverly Hills developer Shlomo Meiri proposed, inward April, to build a 60-story, mixed-use casino holiday resort and residential complex named Harlem Nights (after the 1989 Eddie Murphy/Richard Pryor film).
Meiri’s original plans for his 2 acres called for a hotel to arrive at 60 stories into the sky and include a gambling casino inwards the renovated Town Tavern building. However, a petition from the FAA scaled his ambitious hotel plans mastered to 34 stories. And now the Town Tavern edifice is a teardown.
“It’s more complicated because now there’s no more edifice to refinance, but it shouldn’t alter the timing, as long as the metropolis testament piece of work together with me to convey the community together and get along something,” Meiri told KVVU-TV.
No approvals make been secured for Harlem Nights yet, though Meiri says he relieve hopes to finish his stargaze send off within fin years.
Site’s Storied History
The Ithiel Town Tavern opened on July 5, 1955. The 7,000 square-foot nighttime club, which also featured cosh and craps, was a hotspot for African American culture inward the epoch before the desegregation of the Las Vegas Strip inward 1960.
At first, the Town Tavern was overshadowed by the nearby Moulin Rouge, which became the nation’s 1st to the full desegregated gambling casino hotel when it opened 42 days before in the same community. a photo of two Moulin Rouge showgirls regular made the June 20, 1955 screening of Life magazine.
The Moulin Rouge operated for only if sextuplet months before it closed under occult circumstances, leaving its legacy to be inherited past the Ithiel Town Tavern. The Town Tavern became known for drop-in sets by legendary performers, including Joseph Louis Barrow Satchmo and the Ink Spots, and an audience that often included the likes of Cab Calloway, Chubby Checker, Nat Martin Luther King Cole, and Sammy Stuart Davis Jr.
The Ithiel Town Tavern was renamed the New Town Tavern when different owners took o'er inwards 1959. It closed in 1970 but reopened inward 1981 as the Ultra New Town Tavern, which featured 36 one-armed bandit machines and II gaming tables. In 2003, a year after the death of its lastly owner/operator, the club’s roof collapsed.
The edifice was deemed unsafe and boarded upward by the city of Las Vegas inward 2010.