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Downtown Las Vegas will bid farewell to three of its long-running businesses today, as the Mermaids and La Bayou casinos are closing along with the Girls of Glitter Gulch strip club.
Soon, the western end of the Fremont Street Experience will no longer be home to Mermaids’ famous deep-fried Twinkies and Oreos. Future tourists will also have to do without La Bayou’s coin-operated slot machines and the homemade daiquiris available at both sister properties.
They’re not huge developments — nowhere near the scale of the closing of a major Strip property like the Riviera — but their departure is nonetheless a sentimental one.
“We’re the last of a dying breed down there,” said Rudy Nino, general manager of all three businesses since 2008. “We’re the only place on Fremont that has slot machines-only. We don’t have table games, we don’t have a fancy restaurant, we don’t have a hotel ... We’re kind of unique in that way.”
The businesses were sold in April to Derek and Greg Stevens, who also own the Golden Gate, the D and the shuttered Las Vegas Club property nearby. The brothers are planning to develop a new hotel-casino in the area.
Yet little else is known about what, exactly, they will build, or on what timeline those plans will play out. Derek Stevens has offered few details other than saying that the new development would likely include a combination of demolition, renovation and new construction.
Stevens said in an interview that the purchase presented an opportunity to “create a project that’s bigger and a different scope” than the Las Vegas Club, which neighbors Glitter Gulch and Mermaids.
La Bayou, meanwhile, is situated across the street from those businesses — right next to Stevens’ Golden Gate casino. That has created the possibility that the Golden Gate could “evolve” in some fashion as well, according to Stevens.
He has remained relatively tight-lipped otherwise.
“At this point, I’m still in the same position where there’s a number of things that need to evolve now. Now that we really have a larger real estate footprint, we can really go to work on the size and scope of the project,” Stevens said.. “I’m not trying to be evasive — that’s just the reality of it.”
Mermaids and La Bayou have each gone by different names over the years. La Bayou carries particular historical significance: When it was called the Northern Club in 1931, it was awarded the first gaming license in Las Vegas, according to the Nevada Resort Association.
David Schwartz, director of UNLV’s Center for Gaming Research, said the casinos were “part of the downtown ecosystem for a long time,” and characterized them as “more value-oriented properties.” He said he wasn’t surprised to see Stevens take them over.
Stevens and his brother are doing so at an opportune time for gambling and tourism in the Fremont Street area.
Once wounded badly by the recession and other economic factors, downtown Las Vegas has been experiencing a renaissance of sorts in recent years. Some of the most visible changes have come from Zappos chief Tony Hsieh and his Downtown Project, which has drawn locals and tourists alike to the east part of Fremont Street through substantial investments in new restaurants, bars and retail.
The neighborhood has changed on other significant ways, too. Multiple downtown casinos have made major efforts to improve their hotel rooms, dining options, gambling floors and, more recently, pool areas. At the same time, city officials have tried to make the Fremont Street Experience cleaner and safer through restrictions on liquor consumption and the controversial implementation of performance zones for street entertainers.
Recent gambling and tourism figures also tell a largely positive story for downtown Las Vegas. Gaming revenue there rose 5.95 percent to $541.8 million last year, and it’s also up about 5 percent for the six-month period from November through April of this year.
Schwartz noted that the downtown gaming market outperformed both the Las Vegas Strip and the state of Nevada overall during the most recently reported six-month stretch. That may be because it had been more successful in attracting gamblers, he said.
“The Strip is clearly not just focusing on gambling anymore — they’re doing a lot of stuff,” Schwartz said, referring to nightclubs, dining, retail and so forth. “I think downtown, to a large extent, is still very focused on and hospitable to gamblers.”
Additionally, hotel room occupancy downtown rose 3.5 percentage points in 2015, while the average daily room rate increased 5 percent, according to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. Through April of this year, occupancy was up 2.7 percentage points and the average daily rate was up 11.2 percent, figures from the authority show.
“For the last couple years, I think, we’ve seen some renewed growth,” Stevens said. “I think downtown is going to continue to grow. There’s an awful lot of energy downtown with different entrepreneurs and different levels of investment that the hotel-casino guys are putting into Fremont.”
Stevens and his brother have played a big role in that investment, starting with their involvement in the Golden Gate and continuing to their purchase of the old Fitzgeralds casino, which they converted into the D. The brothers also transformed the site of an old county courthouse near the D into the Downtown Las Vegas Events Center, an outdoor venue that has been the site of concerts and boxing matches.
Nino said Stevens was a visionary helping to lead Fremont Street in a new direction.
“It’s totally changed. And I have to say, what it was like in the '60s and '70s — it was good. But it needed to make the change to get where we’re at in Vegas,” Nino said. “(Stevens) wants to step outside the box and bring people downtown. He’s a real big believer in downtown and the Fremont Street Experience.”
Glitter Gulch is expected to close at 4 a.m. today, according to Nino, while Mermaids and La Bayou should both close at 11 p.m.