Learning From Las Vegas: Liberace’s Strip Mall
For readers too young to have any memory of Liberace, in the 1950s and 60s he was one of the highest paid entertainers in the world. He had his own television show that rivaled “I Love Lucy” and he performed live at Carnegie Hall in New York and the London Palladium. He’s often dismissed as someone who appealed to women of a certain age and men of a certain persuasion. But whenever I see a rapper wearing heavy gold chains, diamond studs, garish watches, oversized rings, and extravagant furs stepping out of a ridiculously expensive car…. I see more than a little Liberace going on.
This was one of his many homes. If you’ve ever flown into Las Vegas International Airport you pretty much glided right over the roof. It’s super close to the main runway. My first impression? It looks like an Italian restaurant in New Jersey.
I recently saw the former home of Johnny Cash from the same Kennedy era time frame on a real estate listing site. It was a perfectly comfortable home, but like Liberace’s place it seemed underwhelming with its wagon wheel chandeliers and imitation wood beams hot glued to the kitchen ceiling. It was a little bit of Nashville in the hills of Southern California with a faux hacienda vibe and linoleum. Kitsch comes in many flavors.
Anyway, the Liberace Mansion is currently a private residence no doubt owned by someone who appreciates the distinctive aesthetic and provenance.
Around the corner are modest homes from the same period. It’s clear that for a long time these houses had declined and are only just recently turning over to new owners. As Vegas grew exponentially outward in every direction the lure of larger more up-to-date properties drew money and attention away from established neighborhoods. If these older places are lucky they get rediscovered every couple of generations and see new investment and care. Is the area tragically passé and a bad investment? Or is it convenient to culture and employment at a bargain price point compared to far flung subdivisions out on the suburban periphery? It depends on who you ask.
Directly across the street older homes are being scraped for new development. The University of Nevada is right across the road. The dirt has more value than the vintage buildings that sit on it. Traffic makes this a less desirable venue for single family properties. Commercial and institutional uses are pressing in.
Several properties on the block have been repurposed as social service facilities, youth outreach centers, women’s shelters, and housing assistance agencies. The point here is that over time places evolve and change. The Las Vegas of 1962 is gone and isn’t coming back.
If you take a three minute drive down Tropicana Avenue you’ll find the defunct Liberace Museum. Liberace bought the entire brand new strip mall in 1978 as part of his diversified investment portfolio. Much like professional athletes, people in the entertainment industry tend to have peaks and valleys in their income. Not everyone who’s pulling in millions when they’re 25 is still able to earn that when they’re 40. Smart individuals take the surplus from a good year and create durable revenue streams from other sources. As prosaic as discount furniture outlets, convenience stores, and hair salons might be, a strip mall can be a cash cow for decades. You can’t always say that about a football career.
At its height the Liberace Museum welcomed 450,000 visitors a year. A certain percentage of those tourists also stopped by the various shops and restaurants at the strip mall. Tivoli Gardens, also owned by Liberace, was right next door and was an excellent example of entrepreneurial synergy. Guests could dine in an immersive Liberace designed environment after visiting the museum. This was a successful business venture for decades and served Liberace very well until his death in 1986 at age 67. Rents from the shopping plaza continued to supplement the museum’s endowment posthumously for many years.
But like I said… things change. The greater Las Vegas metroplex continued to expand with shiny new retail plazas farther and farther out year after year. The old 1970s strip malls aged just as the old tract homes did. Businesses struggled in passed over locations with a less affluent customer base. Liberace’s primary audience also aged and shuffled off stage. The financial crash of 2008 put the last nail in the museum’s coffin when only 50,000 visitors arrived and the strip mall experienced multiple vacancies. The revenue and rents just weren’t there anymore. The museum closed permanently in 2010 and is now a 76 bed adult daycare facility.
There are so many aging retail centers like this absolutely everywhere that there just aren’t enough viable businesses to keep them all occupied. This “escape room” (see also, paint gun adventure parks, indoor jungle gyms, Halloween haunted house tours, etc.) is a lower value use for an otherwise vacant retail pod out in the parking lot. I counted half the storefronts empty in the rest of the complex. Everything has a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Wayne Newton, now 80 years old, may not be familiar to people below a certain age. But like Liberace he was a big deal in popular culture at one time. His 39 acre estate and 57,000 square foot mansion known as Casa de Shenandoah is not far away. Newton began buying land and building out the property in 1966 and the bulk of the estate was completed by 1978. It had it’s own private jet, a heliport, a 53 stall equestrian center for his prized Arabian horses, and a garage for 16 vintage cars.
Then, as his income stagnated and declined with age, the cost of maintaining the property outstripped his resources. So he did what all red blooded Americans do. He took on debt to keep things going. There were short lived attempts at a museum that offered tours of the property. There were proposals to create a resort casino entertainment complex on the site. There were various partnerships where Newton retained a 10% share of the place and was able to continue his equestrian operation. But eventually he and his wife were forced to vacate the property in 2013 when the accumulated obligations could no longer be managed even with the smoke and mirrors of creative accounting. The current owner is a development firm rather than an individual homeowner. Newton is still engaged in litigation in an attempt to cling to some scraps. Beginnings, middles, and ends.
Out in another slightly newer section of the ever expanding Las Vegas sprawl is the former estate of Siegfried & Roy. The German duo were famous for their extravagant magic acts that included white tigers. The 100 acre property was constructed in phases over thirty years. Roy died at age 75 in 2020 and Siegfried died at 81 in 2021. Like Newton’s estate there are only so many individuals who can both afford to own and maintain such a property and who actually want to. It’s not so much a home as an ongoing theatrical production with a very high burn rate.
When the furniture and other collectable items were auctioned off the sale yielded $1,400,000 that went to Siegfried and Roy’s personal charitable foundation. An article in the Los Angeles Times hinted that each of the items individually weren’t appraised for all that much and were generally acquired for the story behind the objects. That was a polite way of saying it was all a lot of tacky trash.
Across the street from the estate are used car dealerships, strip malls, and modest tract homes that are now approaching thirty years old. We know how this trajectory ends. Things age. People migrate away to the next shiny new destination. Business slumps. Maintenance costs pile up. Beginnings, middles, and ends.
