KVIG Informative

The valley’s oldest surviving hotel building has carried three names and passed through at least three ownership groups since 1906, and it is still independently owned today, even as a handful of publicly traded companies have come to control most of the Strip around it.

According to a Jan. 13, 1906, item in the Las Vegas Age, the valley’s first newspaper, a new two-story building called the Hotel Nevada had opened at the southeast corner of Fremont and Main streets. John F. Miller built it after buying the corner lot at a railroad land auction in May 1905, running a temporary tent hotel on the site while construction finished, according to the same newspaper’s reporting that spring.

The hotel’s small casino closed along with every other gambling operation in the state in 1910, when a Nevada law banning gambling statewide took effect. It would stay closed for two decades, until the Legislature legalized gambling again in 1931.

In early 1932, with the building expanded to three and four stories, Miller renamed the hotel Sal Sagev — Las Vegas spelled backward — according to a building survey UNLV Special Collections and Archives maintains on the property’s neon signage.

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In July 1955, Miller leased the hotel’s ground floor to a 22-man investment group, which in turn subleased the space for $25,000 a month to eight Bay Area businessmen — including Italo Ghelfi, Robert Picardo, Al Durante, Leo Massaro, Dan Fiorito and Tiny Naylor — according to matching accounts the Reno Evening Gazette and the Nevada State Journal both published on July 27, 1955. Miller was to collect $2,300 a month plus 5% of gambling profits under the deal, the two newspapers reported. The new owners named their ground-floor casino the Golden Gate, after the Bay Area city many of them came from, while the hotel upstairs kept the Sal Sagev name.

Ghelfi ran the Golden Gate’s casino operation for nearly 40 years. In 1959, the casino began serving a 50-cent shrimp cocktail, a dish modeled on the seafood stands at San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf, according to the Golden Gate’s own historical account of the property. The casino raised the price to 99 cents in 1991, after years of losing roughly $300,000 annually on the dish at the original price, the same account states.

The entire property was renamed the Golden Gate Hotel and Casino in 1974, according to a history of the building written by Nevada historian Michael Green for the Online Nevada Encyclopedia, a project of Nevada Humanities. By 1990, the Ghelfi family had bought out the rest of the ownership partnership, Green’s history states.

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In March 2008, Nevada’s gaming regulators approved the sale of a 50% stake in the Golden Gate to Desert Rock Enterprises, the investment company of brothers Derek and Greg Stevens, according to the Nevada Gaming Commission’s own approval action that month. The Stevens brothers became full owners of the property in 2016. Most of the Strip a few miles south is now controlled by a handful of publicly traded conglomerates with shareholders scattered across the country. The building Miller put up in 1906 is still owned by the family that bought into it less than two decades ago — one of the last reminders on Fremont Street that Las Vegas gaming wasn’t always a shareholder’s business.