The El Cortez opened on November 7, 1941, at the corner of Sixth and Fremont, then the eastern edge of the casino district. It cost about $245,000 to build. Marion Hicks, a Los Angeles builder, and J. Kell Houssels, who already owned the Las Vegas Club, were the principal owners. It was the largest resort in the city at the time and the first to be built with the hotel and casino planned as one operation rather than a casino with rooms added upstairs.
It has not closed since. The El Cortez is the longest continuously operating casino in Las Vegas, and the only one from its era still in its original building and under its original name.
1945
In 1945 a group that included Benjamin Siegel, Meyer Lansky, Moe Sedway, and Gus Greenbaum bought the El Cortez for $600,000. They held it for less than a year, sold it in 1946 at a profit, and put the proceeds toward the Flamingo on the highway south of town, which opened in December of that year and shifted the city’s center of gravity to what would become the Strip. The El Cortez’s part in that story is brief, but it is the only building still standing where Siegel’s group operated.
The Gaughan years
Jackie Gaughan bought the El Cortez in 1963. Gaughan, who had come to Las Vegas from Omaha after the war and started with a share of the Boulder Club, built the largest downtown portfolio of his era: at various times he owned or held shares in the Plaza, the Las Vegas Club, the Gold Spike, the Western, and the Union Plaza. The El Cortez was his base. He added the fourteen-story tower in 1980 and kept an apartment on its top floor, where he lived until his death in 2014 at the age of 93. He was known to walk the casino floor daily into his nineties.
Gaughan ran the El Cortez as a value house: low table minimums, 3:2 blackjack, cheap rooms, a coffee shop, and a customer base of locals and repeat visitors. That positioning has not changed.
2008 to now
Kenny Epstein, who had worked for Gaughan since the 1970s, led the group that bought the El Cortez in 2008. Epstein’s ownership has brought a steady renovation of the property while keeping its character: the original 1941 building’s rooms were restored, a separate boutique building of suites, the Cabana Suites, was created across Ogden Avenue in 2009, and the casino floor and exterior neon were restored rather than replaced.
In 2013 the El Cortez was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the first Las Vegas casino to be so designated. The listing covers the original building, with its Spanish Colonial detailing and its vertical sign.
The building
The 1941 structure faces Fremont with a tiled roofline and the original vertical “El Cortez” sign. The tower behind it is plain by comparison. Inside, the casino floor is a single large room on the ground level, with the Siegel-era vault still in place. The coffee shop, Siegel’s 1941, is on the corner. The hotel’s own history is on the walls: photographs of Gaughan, of the 1941 opening, and of the Siegel group’s ownership, which the property acknowledges with more candor than most.
The El Cortez remains independently owned, which in downtown Las Vegas makes it one of a small group. It has outlasted the Boulder Club, the Pioneer Club, the Mint, the Las Vegas Club, and every other casino that was on Fremont Street when it opened.