Las Vegas landmark 'The Riviera' closes its doors after 60 glitzy years
The Riviera lit up the famous gambling strip in its heyday and played host to Hollywood royalty - but this week closed its doors for the last time.
If the ghosts of Frank Sinatra and Liberace were still hanging around the Riviera Hotel and Casino, they wouldn't have found a seat at the bar.
Crowds squeezed onto bar stools and milled about the casino floor on Monday morning, saying goodbye to "The Riv", a classic that spent 60 years on the Las Vegas Strip and closed at noon. It's an age reached by few properties along the four-mile stretch of hulking casino resorts mimicking other worldly landmarks or beckoning passers-by with all their wants in one place that have replaced Sin City's recent past.
The Riviera's only remaining elder was the Flamingo that Bugsy Siegel debuted in 1947. The Tropicana, which opened in 1957, is close behind.
"The amazing thing about Las Vegas is how soon it forgets itself because it keeps reinventing itself," said Jeff Kutash, the dancer, choreographer and producer who brought the aquatic stage spectacle Splash to a Riviera stage for 21 years.
The 60-year-old casino-hotel's lustre had faded, becoming the place to go for cheap drinks, cheap blackjack and a free photo-op in front with the ladies of topless revue Crazy Girls, posteriors immortalised with a bronze statue of their behinds.
Long before the buns of bronze were loaded onto the back of a pick-up truck's trailer on Monday, the Riviera was among the first casinos to make this stretch of desert glitter. Like the others, mob money made sure the lights were always on at the Riviera.