Marion Hicks drove into Phoenix one day in December 1939 and asked his old gambling partner John Grayson if he had $75,000 in cash. Grayson said he could get it. "He asked me to meet him in Las Vegas tomorrow at noon."
That's how the oldest continuously operating casino in Las Vegas got started. Two California casino men, ousted during anti-gambling crackdowns in the late 1930s, looking for somewhere legal to do what they already knew how to do.
The El Cortez Hotel and Casino opened its doors on November 7, 1941, promoting itself as "the new uptown hotel in the heart of downtown Las Vegas." It was the only really modern hotel in town. Everything else had been there for thirty years or more. The timing was either brave or reckless — America would be at war within the month. It turned out to be brave. The place did well enough that they expanded within the first year, adding rooms, a dining room, and a swimming pool.
It did well enough to attract the wrong kind of attention.In 1945, Bugsy Siegel, Meyer Lansky, Gus Greenbaum, and Moe Sedway bought the property. They paid a reported $600,000 for something that had cost $325,000 to build four years earlier. Siegel had bigger plans on the horizon. The Flamingo was already taking shape a few miles down the highway, but the El Cortez was a useful piece of the operation while it lasted. It didn't last long. J. Kell Houssels reacquired the property in 1946 and got back to running it like a hotel instead of a syndicate asset.
A new neon sign went up in 1952, the iconic arrow marquee that still marks the corner today. It became one of the defining images of Fremont Street at a time when Fremont Street was the whole show.
In 1963, Jackie Gaughan bought the El Cortez and held onto it for decades, running it the way old Las Vegas operators ran things — unpretentiously, profitably, with a loyalty to the kind of gambler who wasn't interested in a show. Gaughan's penthouse sat on top of the building for years. After his death it was preserved largely unchanged and made available for bookings. The kind of thing that only happens when a place has actually meant something to someone.
In 2013, the El Cortez became the only active casino in the country to be placed on the National Register of Historic Places. It is still open. Still on Fremont Street. Still a block further east than the tourists tend to wander, which is probably part of why it survived when so many others didn't.
