KVIG Informative

Two local operators financed a riverboat-themed casino on Boulder Highway in 1954, a $2 million gamble on a stretch of road nowhere near the Strip. Over the next half-century it was incorporated, taken public, sold to a billion-dollar corporation, sold again, shut down and demolished. The company that bought it in 1998 is still in business today — just not under the name it used when it wrote that check.

The Showboat Hotel and Casino opened Sept. 3, 1954, housed in a building modeled on a Mississippi riverboat, according to a finding aid held by UNLV Special Collections and Archives. The Las Vegas Club, headed by J. Kell Houssels and William J. Moore Jr., financed the roughly $2 million property, the finding aid states.

Houssels and a partner, Joseph Kelly, restructured the business in 1959, forming an investor group that incorporated the property as New Hotel Showboat, Inc., according to the same finding aid. The company became known for its large bowling alleys, which hosted multiple tournaments. A decade later, in 1969, New Hotel Showboat went public, moving the property from a closely held local investment into shares that traded on the open market.

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Showboat, Inc. agreed on April 23, 1998, to be acquired by Harrah’s Entertainment for $1.5 billion, according to the UNLV finding aid, ending the company’s run as an independent public operator. Harrah’s held the Las Vegas property only briefly. In 2000, the company sold it to VSS Enterprises, which renamed it the Castaways Hotel and Casino — a name it shared only in spelling with the unrelated 1960s-era Castaways that once stood on the Strip near what is now the Mirage.

VSS Enterprises filed for bankruptcy, and the Castaways closed in January 2004, according to the finding aid. Station Casinos, Inc. bought the property in 2006, and the former Showboat was demolished on Jan. 11, 2006, bringing down the Boulder Highway building that had stood for almost 52 years.

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Harrah’s Entertainment, Inc., the company whose $1.5 billion check ended Showboat’s independence, later changed its own name. On Nov. 22, 2010, Caesars Entertainment Corporation filed a certificate of amendment with the Delaware Secretary of State completing the name change from Harrah’s Entertainment, Inc., according to the company’s own filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The filing also renamed the operating subsidiary that had run properties like the former Showboat, from Harrah’s Operating Company to Caesars Entertainment Operating Company, effective the same day.

The riverboat facade and the bowling alleys are gone. So is the company name that bought them. What survived the trip from a $2 million local investment in 1954 to a $1.5 billion corporate acquisition in 1998 is the pattern itself: Nevada’s casino industry kept consolidating long after the Showboat’s lights went dark, and the company that absorbed it is still writing checks that size under the Caesars name today.