There always seem to be a few lamentations when someone pulls down a Strip icon, but the protests are getting more and more muted. That’s mostly because Las Vegas resort architecture seems to be essentially disposable; it’s built for specific market conditions, and when they change, it is renovated beyond recognition or replaced. It’s just a fact of life.
But there are some people who treasure the “classic” Vegas designs, though classic in this context doesn’t have much meaning. Does it mean buildings dating from the 1940s? 1950s? 1960s? Or is it just a catch-all phrase for any casino old enough to have a really inefficient air handling system? If you walk out reeking of smoke, you’re in Classic Vegas, but if not, you’re in sanitized “corporate” Vegas.
Still, there are a several architects whose work deserves to be remembered, both of its evolutionary significance and its own aesthetic merit. One of these is Wayne McAllister, and, as can be imagined, this book is about him.
Chris Nichols. The Leisure Architecture of Wayne McAllister. Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 2007. 160 pp, paperback.
Wayne McAllister certainly got some of the most historic commissions in Las Vegas history: the El Rancho Vegas (1941), the first real resort on the Strip; the basic plan for the Desert Inn (1950); the Sands (1952); and the Fremont (1956). So Chris Nichols’ look at McAllister’s leisure architecture has relevance for the study of Las Vegas.
McAllister’s career wouldn’t have been possible today: with no formal architectural training, he nonetheless became a sought-after restaurant, nightclub, and hotel designer. Born in San Diego in 1907, McAllister was drawn to architecture in high school and rather than attend college, got a job as a draftsman. After a foray into brewing beer, he designed the Agua Caliente resort, a cross-border casino/racetrack/resort complex near Tijuana.
This was a look ahead to the future of Las Vegas, though no one knew this when it opened in 1928–legalized Nevada gaming was still 3 years away, and Reno seemed poised to remain the state’s leading city in every sense. Agua Caliente was incredibly expensive–$10 million, which would build two respectable Strip resorts thirty years later. It was layered in stucco, terra cotta, and tiles, with a Spanish Mission theme predominating. Though it closed with the Mexican government’s gambling ban in 1935, it remained fixed in the public consciousness well into the early Strip era.
After his work on this groundbreaking resort, McAllister relocated to Los Angeles, where he remodeled and designed from scratch a series of hotels, nightclubs, and drive-ins. Nichols devotes special attention to the drive-ins and coffee shops, which include Simon’s, the Wich Stand, the Pig n’ Whistle, McDonnell’s Plantation, and Bob’s Big Boy. Then there are the more formal “dinner houses,” such as Richlor’s, the Smoke House, and Lawry’s (McAllister built the 1947 Beverly Hills restaurant by that name).
Then there are the Vegas years. The El Rancho Vegas really started the Las Vegas Strip back in 1941; if it had been a failure, development might have shifted northward, as it did after Tony Cornero’s Meadows wilted on Boulder Highway in the mid-1930s. With its central casino/dinner theater building circled by ample greenery and sprawling bungalows, the El Rancho Vegas set the pattern for the first generation of casino resort.
McAllister didn’t finish the Desert Inn, nor did he design its casino, but he influenced the resort as it was finally realized. The Sands, by contrast, stands as McAllister’s biggest legacy on the Strip–the El Rancho Vegas burned down in 1960, just when Las Vegas was getting off the ground, and the Sands was just coming into its Golden Age then. McAllister designed the casino, the Copa Lounge, and the original low-rise hotel wings (Martin Stern, Jr., created the iconic circular tower in 1965). Looking at the wealth of Sands pictures that adorn this book, the reader is transported back in time.
In 1956, after his Fremont casino capped his Las Vegas career, McAllister accepted a position with the Marriott hotel chain, followed by a series of non-architectural ventures. His legacy in Las Vegas probably rests most firmly on the idea behind the El Rancho Vegas and the execution of the Sands.
Nichols’ book is well-researched and has a multitude (150, actually) of photographs that give the reader a real sense of McAllister’s design. For those who revel in all things moderne, the book is a visual treat.
There’s a sense of something missing, though; I’m not precisely sure what it is, but the book’s organization isn’t intuitive. After a brief biographical section, Nichols runs through chapters on Agua Caliente, hotels, drive-ins, dinner houses, and Las Vegas. As a result, there’s not a real sense of evolution, just a choppy synopsis of a series of similar building types. This approach is fine for those who want to look at all of the drive-ins, then all of the dinner houses, but doesn’t really get to McAllister’s growth as an architect. How did his work between 1941 and 1947 change his conception of the resort as reflected in the El Rancho Vegas and the Desert Inn? That’s an important question and one seemingly crucial to evaluating his career as an architect, but it isn’t even asked here.
This might be the difference between history and historic preservation; historians want to understand change over time, while historic preservationists want to keep what they consider significant buildings intact, in something close to their original state. A real study of McAllister’s work would ask deeper questions and provide more satisfying answers.
Even if this book doesn’t bill itself as history but as an “illuminating retrospective,” a more careful framing of McAllister’s context and legacy would really give the reader–even the casual one who just wants to look at the pictures–a better sense for McAllister’s place in the mid-20th century resort architecture pantheon. I’m sure that an expert would be able to correctly place McAllister among Stern, Paul Williams, Morris Lapidus, and others, but the average reader of Leisure Architecture wouldn’t have a clue.
If you’ve got an extensive Las Vegas library at home, The Leisure Architecture of Wayne McAllister will make a welcome addition, but I’d pick up Alan Hess’s Viva Las Vegas: After-Hours Architecture to get a better perspective on McAllister’s place in history, if you don’t already have it.