Caesars Palace
Caesars Palace is a luxury hotel and casino in Paradise, Nevada, United States. The hotel is situated on the west side of the Las Vegas Strip between Bellagio and The Mirage. It is one of Las Vegas's largest and best known landmarks.
Caesars Palace was opened in 1966 by Jay Sarno and Stanley Mallin, who sought to create an opulent facility that gave guests a sense of life during the Roman Empire. It contains many statues, columns and iconography typical of Hollywood Roman period productions including a statue of Augustus Caesar near the entrance. Caesars Palace is now owned by Vici Properties and operated by Caesars Entertainment. As of July 2016, the hotel has 3,960 rooms and suites in six towers and a convention facility of over.
The hotel has a large range of restaurants. From the outset, Caesars Palace has been oriented towards attracting high rollers. The modern casino facilities include table games such as blackjack, craps, roulette, baccarat, Spanish 21, mini-baccarat, Pai Gow and Pai Gow poker. The casino also features a 24-hour poker room; and many slot machines and video poker machines.
The hotel has operated as a host venue for live music and sports entertainment. In addition to holding boxing matches since the late 1970s, Caesars also hosted the Caesars Palace Grand Prix from 1981 to 1982. Notable entertainers who have performed at Caesars Palace include Frank Sinatra, Reba McEntire, Brooks & Dunn, Sammy Davis Jr., Teresa Teng, Dean Martin, Rod Stewart, Stevie Nicks, The Moody Blues, Celine Dion, Ike & Tina Turner, Shania Twain, Patti Page, Bette Midler, Cher, Elton John, Liberace, Diana Ross, Liza Minnelli, Julio Iglesias, Tony Bennett, Harry Belafonte, Julie Andrews, Judy Garland, Gloria Estefan, Janet Jackson, Mariah Carey, Sting, Matt Goss, Adele, and Deana Martin.
The main performance venue is The Colosseum. The theater seats 4,296 people and contains a stage. The stage was a special construction for Celine Dion's show, "A New Day...", in 2003. After departing in 2007, Dion returned to the Colosseum with her new show entitled "Celine" on March 15, 2011, which was under contract through June 9, 2018 for 65 shows per year.
History
20th century
In 1962, cabana motel owners Jay Sarno and Stanley Mallin received a $10.6 million loan from the Teamsters Central States Pension Fund. They began plans to build a hotel on land owned by Kirk Kerkorian. Sarno would later act as designer of the hotel he planned to construct. His vision was to emulate life under the Roman Empire. The objective of the palace was to ensure an atmosphere in which everybody staying at the hotel would feel like a Caesar; this is why the name "Caesars Palace" lacks an apostrophe, making "Caesars" a plural instead of possessive noun. Caesars Palace was instrumental in beginning a new era of lavish casinos from the late 1960s onward. The original hotel was designed by architect Melvin Grossman, who had worked primarily in Miami. The design of Caesars borrowed heavily from his earlier Cabaña Hotel in Palo Alto. Architectural writer, Alan Hess, stated: "Caesars Palace needed only a sumptuous array of Classical statuary and a host of marble-white columns to establish its theme. The visitor's imagination, in league with well-placed publicity, filled in the opulence". Jefferson Graham wrote that the result was "the gaudiest, weirdest, most elaborate, and most talked about resort Vegas had ever seen. emblem was a chesty female dipping grapes into the waiting mouth of a recumbent Roman, fitted out in toga, laurel wreath, and phallic dagger".The inauguration ceremony was held on August 5, 1966. Sarno and his partner, Nate Jacobsen, spent one million dollars on the event. The cost included "the largest order of Ukrainian caviar ever placed by a private organization", two tons of filet mignon, of Maryland crabmeat and 50,000 glasses of champagne. Cocktail waitresses in Greco-Roman wigs would greet guests and say "Welcome to Caesars Palace, I am your slave". Among the performers at the opening were Andy Williams and Phil Richards. According to author Ovid Demaris, Caesars Palace was "a mob-controlled casino from the day it opened its doors". By the time it opened, the significant publicity of the new hotel had generated $42 million in advanced bookings.
On December 31, 1967, stunt performer Evel Knievel arrived at the hotel to watch a boxing match and convinced Sarno that he could jump over the distance of over the fountains. ABC came in to film the jump, in which Knievel hit the top of the safety ramp after the jump and flew over his handlebars into the parking lot of neighbouring Dunes. Fracturing his pelvis, several bones and suffering a concussion, he lay in a hospital unconscious for 29 days in a coma before recovering. On April 14, 1989, Knievel's son Robbie successfully completed the jump.
The first casino at the hotel was named Circus Circus. It was intended to be the world's liveliest and most expensive casino, attracting elite gamblers from around the world. In 1969, a Federal Organized Crime Task Force accused the casino's financial manager, Jerome Zarowitz, of having ties with organized-crime figures in New York and New England. Although Zarowitz was never tried, the task force pressured Sarno and his other investors to sell the casino, which led to it being acquired by Lum's restaurant chain owners Stuart and Clifford S. Perlman for $60 million. The company soon shed its restaurant operations and changed its name to Caesars World. On July 15 of that year, executives lay ground on an expansion area of the hotel, and they buried a time capsule in the area.
Frank Sinatra began performing at Caesars Palace in 1967, after a fallout with Howard Hughes and Carl Cohen at The Sands. He signed a three-year contract. In the early morning hours of September 6, 1970, Sinatra was playing high stakes baccarat at the casino, where he was performing at the time. Normal limits for the game are US$2,000 per hand; Sinatra had been playing for US$8,000 and wanted the stakes to be raised to US$16,000. When Sinatra began shouting after his request was denied, hotel executive Sanford Waterman came to talk with him. Witnesses to the incident said the two men both made threats, with Waterman producing a gun and pointing it at Sinatra. Sinatra walked out of the casino and returned to his Palm Springs home without fulfilling the rest of his three-week engagement there. Waterman was booked on a charge of assault with a deadly weapon, but was released without bail. The local district attorney's office declined to file charges against Waterman for pulling the gun, stating that Sinatra had refused to make a statement regarding the incident. Despite swearing to never perform at Caesars again, Sinatra returned after his retirement in January 1974, and became a frequent performer at Caesars Palace throughout the decade. He was performing at Caesars when his mother Dolly died in a plane crash in January 1977, and in 1979 he was awarded the Grammy Trustees Award in a party at the hotel, while celebrating 40 years in show business and his 64th birthday. When Sinatra was given back his gaming license by the Nevada Gaming Commission in 1981, he became an entertainment-public relations consultant at the casino for $20,000 a week.
In 1971, some 1,500 black American rights activists stormed the hotel in a protest. The National Welfare Rights Organization was involved with a "coalition of welfare mothers, Legal Services lawyers, radical priests and nuns, civil rights leaders, movie stars and housewives". Five years later in the spring of 1976, hundreds of black American workers went on strike at the hotel in the first major strike in Las Vegas history. The entrances to the hotel and casino were blocked, and the hotel lost several million dollars from the strike, including one cancellation worth $500,000. In 1973, the Del Webb corporation was contracted to build a $8 million 16-story building adjacent to the Palace.
In 1979, a section of two and three-story hotel buildings were demolished, making room for an Omnimax theater, accommodated in a purpose-built geodesic dome at what is currently the site of the Colosseum Theater. A people mover was also constructed in 1979.
In 1981, a fire broke out at the hotel, hospitalizing 16 people. The Perlmans sold their shares in Caesars World that year after trying to get a gaming license for a casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The New Jersey Casino Control Commission accused the brothers of doing business with people who had organized-crime connections.
In the 1990s, the hotel's management sought to create more elaborate features to compete with the other modern Las Vegas developments. The Forum Shops at Caesars opened in 1992; it was one of the first venues in the city where shopping, particularly at high-end fashion house stores, was an attraction in itself.
21st century
An expansion of the Forum Shops opened on October 22, 2004.In June 2005, Harrah's Entertainment acquired Caesars Entertainment, Inc. and became the owner of Caesars Palace. Harrah's changed its own name to Caesars Entertainment in 2010, to capitalize on the prestige of the Caesars brand.
In 2010, Caesars Palace was fined $250,000 by the Nevada Gaming Commission for permitting a high-limit baccarat player to dance on the card table while the game was underway. In September 2015, Caesars Palace agreed to pay the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network an $8 million civil money penalty for violating the Bank Secrecy Act.
In October 2017, ownership of Caesars Palace was transferred to Vici Properties as part of a corporate spin-off; Vici leased the property back to Caesars Entertainment at an initial annual rent of $165 million.
During the COVID-19 pandemic the casino closed on March 17, 2020. A few months later, on June 4, the casino reopened. Certain aspects of the casino remained closed afterward, such as the boutique hotel and restaurant buffet. The Nobu Hotel reopened in July, a month after the casino had reopened. The Bacchanal Buffet reopened the following year, on May 20, 2021, after a $2.4 million renovation. The shows similarly resumed, with many celebrities announcing 2023 Caesars Palace residencies; including Adele, Jerry Seinfeld, Sting, and Rod Stewart.