{"id":288730,"date":"2023-09-07T22:34:00","date_gmt":"2023-09-08T03:34:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.casino.org\/news\/?p=288730"},"modified":"2024-01-31T20:07:15","modified_gmt":"2024-02-01T02:07:15","slug":"lost-vegas-the-las-vegas-park-racetrack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.casino.org\/news\/lost-vegas-the-las-vegas-park-racetrack\/","title":{"rendered":"LOST VEGAS: Las Vegas Park Horse Track Stood Where Elvis AND The Beatles Would Perform"},"content":{"rendered":"
Las Vegas Park opened 70 years ago this week. And you can easily be forgiven for never having heard of the one-mile horse track that was located on the site of today\u2019s Las Vegas Country Club, Las Vegas Convention Center, and Westgate Hotel.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s because it operated for a total of 13 days.<\/p>\nOpening day of Las Vegas Park, which sat on land where Elvis Presley and<\/em> the Beatles would one day perform.\u00a0 (Image: Keeneland Library Thoroughbred Times Collection)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
Las Vegas Park opened with giant aspirations on Sept. 4, 1953 for a 67-day inaugural meet. Its failure to meet those aspirations, or even to complete that schedule, is legendary.<\/p>\n
It Seemed Like a Good Bet<\/h2>\nThe clubhouse and turf club are shown one of the few racing days at Las Vegas Park in 1953. (Image: Keeneland Library Thoroughbred Times Collection)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
Las Vegas\u2019 birth as an entertainment and gambling mecca dovetailed perfectly with the \u201850s boom in Thoroughbred racing. In fact, Las Vegas Park even made history as America\u2019s first racino. (The Las Vegas Gaming Commission permitted 165 slots at the racetrack.)<\/p>\n
It was gorgeous for its day, too. The clubhouse and grandstand were painted pink to replicate Argentina\u2019s Hipodromo Rosado. Virtually no expense was spared in its $4.5 million budget (more than $40 million today).<\/p>\n
And its schedule fit neatly in-between the end of the Del Mar race meeting and the start of the Hollywood Park meeting.<\/p>\n
This track seemed like a sure bet to host one of the premier Kentucky Derby prep races.<\/p>\n
So how did something so perfect stumble out of the gate?<\/p>\n
Major Blinders<\/h2>\n
Before the track ever opened, it already had a backstory tainted by corruption, embezzlement, and major blinders.<\/p>\nAn aerial view of Las Vegas Park shows Sahara and Karen avenues at the top. The building stands approximately where the gate to the Las Vegas Country Club does today. (Image: Vintage Las Vegas)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
That backstory began with Joseph M. Smoot — a New York racing promoter who had an early hand in the success of the Santa Anita and Hialeah racetracks, and figured that meant he could do anything.<\/p>\n
In 1948, Smoot purchased 750 acres of vacant land just east of the Strip from the Leigh Hunt estate at $750 per acre, and began constructing his dream a year later.<\/p>\n
But a little more than a year after that, Smoot woke up in a nightmare. He was charged with three counts of embezzling $24K from the Las Vegas Thoroughbred Racing Association, over which he presided. During a hearing, a federal court judge\u00a0 reportedly asked Smoot to produce receipts or canceled checks for $500K that reportedly went missing without a trace.<\/p>\n
Smoot responded: \u201cYou ever try to pay a politician with a check?\u201d<\/p>\n
Smoot remained under indictment until he died of natural causes in 1955, penniless, in a free room at the Grand Hotel.<\/p>\n
Second Race<\/h2>\n
By 1953, Las Vegas Park was bought out of its first bankruptcy and completed by the Las Vegas Jockey Club, a new corporation headed by investors including Lou Smith and Al Luke. Counting on a ton of big-name horses, and their big-spending Southern California owners, the partners promised to award $1.9 million — the richest prize ever offered by a first-year track.<\/p>\n
To take their bets, they opened the very first $500 betting window at a horse track.<\/p>\nThe sign for Las Vegas Park advertises a meet from Sept. 4 through Dec. 21, 1953 that ended two months early. (Image: YouTube\/Ryan Lee Price)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
When Las Vegas Park finally opened that Sept. 4, some of the horses came. (Among the 75 that ran was 15-time stakes winner Blue Reading.) But the big spenders were mostly AWOL. A devastatingly low take of $252,683 fell nearly $150K short of the $400K daily requirement for the racetrack to meet expenses.<\/p>\n
And the local population couldn\u2019t even fill the seats left by absentee tourists. Clark County had only 50,000 residents back then, compared to nearly 3.3 million today. In all, 8,200 paying customers occupied a space designed to hold 20,000.<\/p>\n
Malfunctioning ticket booths, only one entrance that worked, and a major malfunction of the infield tote board didn\u2019t help matters. After its third day open, the track closed for two weeks while a replacement board was installed, erasing what little momentum and word-of-mouth opening day generated.<\/p>\n
After Las Vegas Park reopened, it didn\u2019t log a single break-even day. When 4,000 customers wagered a total of $100K on Oct. 10, veteran racing journalist Pete Bonamy called it \u201cone of the poorest showings by a racing crowd ever recorded.\u201d<\/p>\n
Las Vegas Park closed on Oct. 19, 1953, after racing only 13 programs.<\/p>\n
\u201cRacing needs population,\u201d columnist Leon Rasmussen wrote in Thoroughbred Record<\/em> magazine at the time, \u201cand although Las Vegas does not hew to convention in very many ways, it is still not quite fabulous enough to sustain a track as pretentious as this one hoped to be.\u201d<\/p>\n
Beating a Dead Horse Track<\/h2>\n
Its stables were vacated in October 1953, though the complex was revived for another short but failed horseracing run the next year. The daily attendance recorded by the Las Vegas Turf Club in December 1954 was even more dismal than its predecessor — at times as low as 400. That experiment lasted seven weeks.<\/p>\nLas Vegas Park during its construction in 1951. The turf course, shown being watered, would have been the first used for racing in the western US, but it was never used. (Image: Las Vegas News Bureau)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
By January 1955, an oil magnate bought the racetrack out of its second bankruptcy for $2.65 million. But Joe W. Brown didn\u2019t intend to build a third failed horseracing track. His thing was purchasing properties to hold onto for others. Two years earlier, he purchased the Horseshoe Club from his old Texas buddy, Benny Binion, so he could run it while Binion served four years in Leavenworth Penitentiary for tax evasion.<\/p>\n
And Brown purchased Las Vegas Park for a similar reason. He was holding onto it while the City of Las Vegas and Clark County got its ducks in a row. Civic leaders wanted a portion of the land to build what eventually became the Las Vegas Convention Center, but didn\u2019t have the funding at the time.<\/p>\n
By January 1956, that deal was complete and the first convention center — a 6,300-capacity, silver-domed rotunda with an adjoining 90,000 square-foot exhibition hall — opened following Brown\u2019s death three years later. On Aug. 20, 1964, it hosted the only Beatles concert staged in Las Vegas.<\/p>\n
Vroom For Rent<\/h2>\n
While it awaited demolition, the renamed and still mostly intact Las Vegas Park Speedway was repurposed for auto racing. It hosted three major races: the AAA Champ Car event in 1954, the NASCAR Grand National Championship in 1955, and a United States Auto Club Grand Prix in 1959.<\/p>\n
It also achieved cinematic immortality by serving as the setting for a racecar scene in the 1964 Elvis Presley movie, “Viva Las Vegas.”<\/p>\nElvis and Ann-Margret are towed along the Las Vegas Park Speedway track as they film a scene for “Viva Las Vegas” in 1963. But this isn’t the last Elvis connection the racetrack would have. (Image: YouTube)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
In 1965, Brown\u2019s estate sold most of the remaining property to National Equities Inc., which later used it to construct the Las Vegas Country Club along Joe. W. Brown Drive. Another 20 acres were sold to Clark County to expand the Convention Center.<\/p>\n
Las Vegas Park was finally demolished in 1966. A year later, National Equities sold 65 of its former acres to Caesars Palace landlord Kirk Kerkorian to build the International Hotel — which meant that Las Vegas Park would enter history for a more unexpected reason…<\/p>\n
Both Elvis and<\/em> the Beatles would one day perform where it once stood.<\/p>\n
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