Moulin Rouge Hotel

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Moulin Rouge Hotel
National Register of Historic Places
Neon sign of the Moulin Rouge Hotel on the façade still preserved at the time (2006)

Neon sign of the Moulin Rouge Hotel on the façade still preserved at the time (2006)

Moulin Rouge Hotel (Nevada)
Paris plan pointer b jms.svg
location Las Vegas , Clark County , Nevada
Coordinates 36 ° 10 '39.3 "  N , 115 ° 9' 15.6"  W Coordinates: 36 ° 10 '39.3 "  N , 115 ° 9' 15.6"  W.
Built 1955
NRHP number 92001701
The NRHP added 22nd December 1992

The Moulin Rouge Hotel is a historic landmark in Las Vegas , Nevada . When it opened in 1955, it became the first non- racial hotel and casino in Las Vegas and on the Strip . Although the Moulin Rouge Hotel had to file for bankruptcy just five months after opening , a historically significant gathering of civil rights activists, administrators and business people took place there in 1960, which, with a few exceptions, focused on an end to the Jim Crow laws for Las Vegas and agreed the strip. The Moulin Rouge Hotel has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1992 .

history

The construction project for the Moulin Rouge Hotel was initiated by the New York restaurateur Louis Rubin and the building contractor Alexander Bisno and a group of smaller investors. The property they chose was on the Westside border . In this part of town from the 1930s, the early since the was war years with the arms industry significantly increasing African-American population, with their shops due to the segregation been pushed. The construction costs for the Moulin Rouge Hotel stood at 3.5 million US dollars . As a Master of Ceremonies and smaller co-owner, Joe Louis was won over as entertainment director Clarence Robinson, who brought with him experience as a presenter from the Paris Moulin Rouge . The rest of the staff was also multiracial. Before the Moulin Rouge Hotel opened, Archie Moore was preparing for his boxing title fight against Niño Valdés . In the Las Vegas Review-Journal , the resort was advertised in a seven-page insert as the first multiracial major hotel in the United States.

The Moulin Rouge Hotel and Casino opened on May 24, 1955. The Moulin Rouge Hotel was the first multiracial establishment of its kind in Las Vegas while segregation was still prevalent in much of the United States . Until the opening of this casino game, it was African Americans prohibited in Las Vegas or on the outlying strip in the resort to dine, play or spend the night, this scheme has been able to assert from the year 1947th These Jim Crow laws, which were common at the time of racial discrimination , also affected prominent African American musicians, such as Sammy Davis Jr. or Pearl Bailey , who had gigs in Las Vegas or on the Strip. The stage show included not only Cancan Go-Go girls, the comedian Stump and Stumpy , Wild Bill Davis , Ahmad Jamal , The Platters , Maurice and Gregory Hines , Lionel Hampton and Dinah Washington . The Moulin Rouge Hotel on the Strip became known because of its late show from 2:30 a.m., the so-called third show , in which Frank Sinatra , Dean Martin , Harry Belafonte , Louis Armstrong , Tallulah Bankhead , Donald O 'Connor , Joe E. Lewis , Gregory Peck , Jack Benny , George Burns , Gracie Allen , Kay Starr , Milton Berle , Fran Warren , Dorothy Lamour, and Nat King Cole were present.

Just five months after opening, the hotel casino had to close again in October 1955 and file for bankruptcy. There are probably several reasons for this: There are several reports that the Moulin Rouge Hotel was poorly managed and suffered from undercapitalization . In view of several civil lawsuits from suppliers and service providers due to non-payment, an attempt was made to involve the smaller investors as shareholders , but this was unsuccessful. Other sources claim that due to the success of the Moulin Rouge, the other hotels on the Strip saw their racially discriminatory business practices at risk and opposed it. So they changed their schedules in such a way that their employees and entertainers were unable to attend or perform at the third show . After the closure, the Moulin Rouge Hotel was used as a building complex by various operators, so that the state of preservation was good for several decades.

In 1960, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) announced protests in Las Vegas and the Strip to oppose racial segregation in local hotels and casinos. To stave off the announced civil rights demonstration , several hotel and casino owners, city and state officials , including Governor Grant Sawyer , met with African American leaders, presided over by NAACP President James McMillan. At the crucial meeting on March 26, 1960, Hank Greenspun, editor of the Las Vegas Sun , acted as arbitrator. The meeting ended with the unexpected result that most of the hotel casino owners agreed to no longer refuse entry and accommodation to African Americans. As a result, the NAACP protest march scheduled for the evening was canceled.

On December 22, 1992, the building complex was added to the National Register of Historic Places as a monument. By the 1990s, the Moulin Rouge Hotel had reopened for 13 years. In 2003, a fire destroyed the casino, leaving only the facade with the neon advertising and the ornamental tower intact. Another fire in 2009, a few days after the historic neon sign was transferred to the Neon Museum in Las Vegas, caused the remaining parts of the building to collapse except for three structures. In the same year the property of the Moulin Rouge Hotel was bought by the company Olympic Coast Investment for 5 million US dollars. In order to keep the license for games of chance for the area, the owners open the casino every two years for 8 hours by using mobile one -armed bandits on the area for this time . Despite these incidents, the Moulin Rouge Hotel is still listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

layout

The architects of the one to two-story building complex in the style of modernism were Howard Sharp and Walter Zick. The one-story building for the casino and show stage connected to the west of the two-story, V-shaped hotel with a very flat roof gable . Both the hotel and the casino were stuccoed and together enclosed an inner courtyard with a swimming pool. For both, the entrance was accentuated by a protruding pavilion with a shingled mansard roof and a square area. To the east of the entrance, the casino was covered with a flat roof, on which was a larger neon sign with the name of the resort. The southeast corner of the casino was formed by a four-storey decorative tower with a footprint of 1.80 x 3.60 meters.

The entrance to the casino led into a lobby with a rear restaurant and a large auditorium to the right. There were original colorful wall paintings that showed can-can dancers, luxury cars and spectators, among other things, and illustrated the typical nightlife of the 1950s as a whole. Behind it was another auditorium called a theater with a stage and tiered, stuccoed, purple ceiling.

literature

  • Earnest N. Bracey: The Moulin Rouge and Black Rights in Las Vegas: A History of the First Racially Integrated Hotel-Casino. McFarland & Company, Jefferson (NC) 2009, ISBN 978-0-7864-3992-8 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Michelle McFadden, Frank Wright: Moulin Rouge Hotel: Registration Form . In: National Register of Historic Places database . National Park Service , August 25, 1992, accessed May 15, 2017 (574 KB), pp. 8, 9
  2. ^ A b Michelle McFadden, Frank Wright: Moulin Rouge Hotel: Registration Form . In: National Register of Historic Places database . National Park Service , August 25, 1992, accessed May 15, 2017 (574 KB), p. 7
  3. ^ A b c Michelle McFadden, Frank Wright: Moulin Rouge Hotel: Registration Form . In: National Register of Historic Places database . National Park Service , August 25, 1992, accessed May 15, 2017 (574 KB), p. 5
  4. ↑ Michelle McFadden, Frank Wright: Moulin Rouge Hotel: Registration Form . In: National Register of Historic Places database . National Park Service , August 25, 1992, accessed May 15, 2017 (574 KB), p. 9
  5. ^ A b Michelle McFadden, Frank Wright: Moulin Rouge Hotel: Registration Form . In: National Register of Historic Places database . National Park Service , August 25, 1992, accessed May 15, 2017 (574 KB), p. 10
  6. ↑ Michelle McFadden, Frank Wright: Moulin Rouge Hotel: Registration Form . In: National Register of Historic Places database . National Park Service , August 25, 1992, accessed May 15, 2017 (574 KB), pp. 10, 11
  7. ^ A b Moulin Rouge Hotel in the National Register Information System. National Park Service , accessed May 15, 2017
  8. ↑ Dave Toplikar: In 'sad moment,' Moulin Rouge demolition moves forward . Web Presence Las Vegas Sun, July 21, 2010, accessed May 21, 2017
  9. ↑ Joe Schoenmann: Gambling returns to old Moulin Rouge - for a day . Web Presence Las Vegas Sun, May 21, 2014, accessed May 21, 2017
  10. ↑ Michelle McFadden, Frank Wright: Moulin Rouge Hotel: Registration Form . In: National Register of Historic Places database . National Park Service , August 25, 1992, accessed May 15, 2017 (574 KB), p. 6