One of Nevada’s legendary casinos is closing up in Lake Tahoe. From KVBC:
Before the Las Vegas Strip ruled the gambling world, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. helped make the Cal Neva lodge one of Nevada's coolest casinos in the early 1960s.
On Wednesday, roulette wheels will stop spinning and blackjack games will cease at Sinatra's old resort that straddles the Nevada-California border on Lake Tahoe's north shore at Crystal Bay.
While the resort's current owner hopes to reopen the casino under a new outside contractor by year's end, some analysts think the Cal Neva might have dealt its last hand. They said Tahoe casinos are particularly vulnerable to the double-whammy of the recession and competition from Las Vegas and Indian casinos.
In 2009, gambling revenues at Lake Tahoe casinos were roughly half of the 1992 total when corrected for inflation, said William Eadington, an economics professor and director of the Institute for the Study of Gambling and Commercial Gaming at the University of Nevada, Reno.
If you want to know more about the Cal Neva’s most controversial hour, you should read Ed Olsen’s oral history, in which he details his run-ins with Sinatra and a few others (including my uncle Skinny, who was for a short time the Cal Neva’s casino manager).
From a more clinical perspective, this is more evidence of the decline of Nevada gaming that I’ve been talking about for a while now. The industry outside of Las Vegas is atrophying, and it has more to do with big structural changes (California Indian casinos) than the recession.
This in and of itself is nothing to wring your hands over (unless you happen to work in one of those casinos), but it continues to present a challenge to Nevada’s current tax structure and its reliance on gaming.