Eighty-Five Years In, El Cortez Is Still Downtown's Oldest Living Room

As El Cortez marks its 85th year on Fremont Street this summer, the small Spanish Colonial casino remains the only one of its era still running exactly where it opened, mob ownership, break-in dealers, and all.

The first resort that never really left

Most of the casinos that opened around El Cortez in the early 1940s are long gone, torn down, rebuilt, or renamed so many times their original identities blurred into whatever came next. El Cortez took a different path. Builders Marion Hicks and J.C. Grayson opened it on November 7, 1941, spending about $245,000 to put up what became downtown Las Vegas's first major resort, and the casino has run continuously on that same stretch of Fremont Street ever since.

That kind of unbroken run is rare enough that it has become the property's defining claim: it bills itself as the sole federally recognized historic casino in Las Vegas that has never once shut its doors since opening. Plenty of Las Vegas landmarks survive as museum pieces or empty shells. El Cortez survives as a working casino floor, which is a much harder trick to pull off across eight and a half decades of a city that tends to bulldoze its own past.

A brief, uneasy chapter with organized crime

El Cortez became profitable enough, fast enough, that it drew attention from figures far beyond ordinary hotel investors. In 1945, four men with well-known underworld ties, Bugsy Siegel, Meyer Lansky, Gus Greenbaum, and Moe Sedway, pooled together roughly $600,000 to purchase the casino from its owner at the time, J. Kell Houssels. Federal records from a few years earlier had already linked the casino's operations to underworld figure Kid Cann, suggesting the criminal interest in El Cortez predated even that formal sale.

The arrangement did not last. Houssels bought the casino back the following year for about $766,000, closing out one of the shorter and less publicized organized-crime ownerships in Las Vegas history. It is a quieter footnote next to the Flamingo's more famous Siegel legacy, but it happened at a building that, unlike the Flamingo, still stands largely as it did then.

Jackie Gaughan's 45 years behind the tables

The chapter most closely tied to El Cortez's identity today began in 1963, when Jackie Gaughan acquired the property. Gaughan expanded it with the Pavilion Rooms and, in 1984, added a 15-story tower, all while cultivating a reputation for the casino as a proving ground where new dealers learned their craft before moving on to bigger Strip properties, earning it an informal nickname downtown as a break-in house.

Gaughan did not just own El Cortez, he lived there, keeping a penthouse suite in the tower and remaining a visible daily presence on the property for decades. He held onto the casino for 45 years, until his death in March 2014, longer than most Las Vegas resorts have existed at all, let alone stayed under one owner.

Landmark status, and what stayed the same

El Cortez earned its listing on the National Register of Historic Places in February 2013, formal recognition of a Spanish Colonial Revival building that has kept much of its original signage and exterior design intact for more than seven decades. That kind of preservation is unusual downtown, where even beloved buildings have often been gutted or replaced beyond recognition long before they reach the 70-year mark.

Kenny Epstein, who has owned El Cortez since 2008, has invested more than $50 million in renovations during his tenure, work aimed at keeping the property functional for modern guests without erasing what made it a historic landmark in the first place. In April 2022, the casino also shifted to a 21-and-over policy, a more recent change layered onto a building that has otherwise resisted the urge to reinvent itself from the ground up.

Turning 85 with new faces and old bones

This summer's anniversary arrives alongside a round of leadership changes at the property, including the promotion of Adam Wiesberg to vice president and general manager, along with new vice presidents overseeing casino operations, player development, and hospitality. El Cortez is marking the milestone with guest-facing offers like a discounted room package running through early September, a modest way of inviting people back through doors that have been open, in one form or another, since before World War II ended.

For a site built to document the buildings Las Vegas keeps rather than the ones it loses, El Cortez is a rare comfort: 85 years on, it is still the same address, still the same silhouette against Fremont Street, and still, somehow, open.

Eight moments in El Cortez's 85 years

A rough timeline of how one downtown casino kept running while so much around it changed.

1. 1941: Marion Hicks and J.C. Grayson open El Cortez as downtown's first major resort for about $245,000.
2. 1945: Bugsy Siegel, Meyer Lansky, Gus Greenbaum, and Moe Sedway buy the casino from J. Kell Houssels for roughly $600,000.
3. 1946: Houssels repurchases the property for about $766,000, ending the brief organized-crime ownership.
4. 1963: Jackie Gaughan acquires El Cortez and begins a 45-year run as owner.
5. 1984: Gaughan adds a 15-story tower, expanding the property beyond its original footprint.
6. 2008: Kenny Epstein takes over ownership and begins a long-running renovation program.
7. 2013: El Cortez is added to the National Register of Historic Places.
8. 2026: The casino marks its 85th anniversary with new executive leadership and summer guest promotions.

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