Landmark Casino Demolished South of Las Vegas

Posted on: January 10, 2024, 11:50h. 

Last updated on: January 11, 2024, 12:17h.

Corey Levitan Read More
Expertise: Commercial Gaming, Entertainment, Expert Insight, Las Vegas, Restaurants, Las Vegas Myths.

The former Gold Strike Casino, a landmark to motorists driving Interstate 15 between California and Las Vegas for more than 35 years, is being torn down to make room for an industrial park.

The Gold Strike Hotel & Gambling Hall in Jean, Nev.
The Gold Strike Hotel & Gambling Hall in Jean, Nev. — rebranded as Terrible’s Hotel & Casino in 2018 — is being torn down and replaced with an industrial park. (Image: Ken Lund/historicvegasproject.com)
The former Gold Strike gets struck this week. (Image: Las Vegas Review-Journal)

The Gold Strike was opened in December 1987 by Dave Belding, Mike Ensign, and William Richardson, who owned the original Gold Strike Hotel near Boulder City (today’s Hoover Dam Lodge).

Opening a 12-story resort with 811 hotel rooms, several restaurants, and 40K square feet of gaming space just 30 miles south of the Las Vegas Strip seemed like a gamble at the time. But the second Gold Strike did better business than expected, largely thanks to day-trip bus tours from L.A. and late-night truckers seeking to shorten their morning commutes back to the Port of Long Beach.

So a sister casino hotel, Nevada Landing, was opened on the other side of the I-15 in 1989. It closed in 2007 and met the wrecking ball a year later.

A rendering shows the first phase of an industrial park planned for the former Gold Strike site on the left, and the former Nevada Landing site on the right. (Tolles Development)

The Gold Strike was acquired in 1995 by the company that became MGM Resorts. In 2015, it was sold again to the Herbst family, which rebranded it Terrible’s, the same strange name used by the family’s local convenience stores and gas stations.

Herbst closed the former Gold Strike during the pandemic and never reopened it.

In 2022, the property was sold for $44.7M to Tolles Development, a Reno-based real estate company that plans to build a 2.84-million-square-foot industrial park on the site, and which is currently advertising for tenants.

Tolles also owns the former Nevada Landing site, so its South Vegas Industrial Center will occupy both sides of the I-15. Ground will be broken on the first phase of the project in late March or early April, and construction completed by the second quarter of 2025.

Jean, Nev.’s only other casino, Pop’s Oasis, closed in 1988.

Developers say the twin 12-foot gold prospector statues gracing the site since 1998 will be donated to a historical society. (Image: weirdnv.com)

Fate of the Giant Miners

After Boulder City’s Gold Strike burned down in 1998, the two 12-food gold prospector statues placed in its parking lot — which originally graced the rooftop sign of the Lucky Strike at 117 Fremont St. when it opened in 1954 — were relocated to the parking lot of the Jean, Nev. Gold Strike, where they remain today.

According to Cory Hunt, a partner in Tolles Development, they will be spared, not destroyed.

“We’re donating them,” Hunt told Casino.org.

Their fate will soon be in the hands of the Goodsprings, Nev. Historical Society. (Jean, Nev. was originally named Goodsprings Junction.)

Hunt said he and his partners tried interesting the Neon Museum in adopting the prospectors, but their inquiry didn’t receive a response.

An email sent to the Goodsprings Historical Society wasn’t returned by the time this article was posted.