The guy wearing a faded Greek sailor cap is sitting by himself at a booth at Careful Kitty’s café at El Cortez. His hair is long and grayish, turning from black, and he is probably in his 50s. But it is so hard to tell. A hard 55, maybe. At first he seems like he might be crazy, speaking loudly but apparently to no one in particular about a friend who used to frequent El Cortez but has seemed to vanish.
“Haven’t seen her in months!” he calls out. She used to eat at Careful Kitty’s. He misses her. What the hell happened to her, anyway? Then, from several feet away, a guy at the counter wearing a Red Sox hat says, “Oh yeah, Rocco, she’s not around anymore! Left, probably six months ago!”
“Too bad!” says Rocco, and continues the cross-restaurant conversation at high volume while he pokes a disassembled cheeseburger with a fork. It is impossible not to eavesdrop, yet no one seems bothered or affected by this banter. Near the restaurant’s entrance, which is open to the spruced-up casino floor, sits a couple who have to be in their 90s. He resembles the old stand-up comic Shelley Berman, but is even older than the comic is. She looks like one of the old benefactors who brings the “checkie” to Max Bialystock in The Producers. She instructs him through his salad, reminding him to keep eating. They are delivered food but have not seemed to order.
These people are not tourists. They are regulars at the Jackie Gaughan-owned landmark hotel on Fremont Street, a few cartwheels east of Las Vegas Boulevard. El Cortez was built in 1941; one of its owners in the early days was Bugsy Siegel, who bought it from original owner J.K. Houssels in 1946. Gaughan purchased it in 1963. Like many of the people who duck into Careful Kitty’s, or who sit for hours betting horses or playing machines a cent at a time, El Cortez had turned arthritic. The air was so thick with smoke that, during a media event last month celebrating the hotel’s new valet area and porte-cochere, Mayor Oscar Goodman said he would not have walked into the hotel even two years ago because of the thick smoke. The hotel had a down-and-dirty reputation, for its location and condition, and a friend once joked that its slogan should be, “At Least We’re Not Gold Spike.”
But $20 million—more than $12 million of which has already been spent —can go far in a place like El Cortez. Having first visited there 10 years ago through a late-night fog of smoke and alcohol, I can’t rightly compare the former El Cortez with the new other than to say that today it is as clean as any hotel on Fremont Street. The new air-filtration system cost $500,000 and seems to do the job, though a faint scent of Marlboro and stale Budweiser (maybe from the Siegel years) still hangs in the air. The bar near the valet entrance features a piano player and a one-drink minimum. In the casino and guest rooms, the walls have been resurfaced with a wood or wood-like paneling. The old carpets have been pulled out and replaced. More than 2,200 slot machines have been removed to make the casino floor more navigable, particularly for those who aggressively push walkers through the gaming area. A new entryway featuring a $600,000 1960s-era sign is in development, and across Ogden Avenue, to the east, the Ogden House wing of the hotel will undergo a similar once-over.
But El Cortez is not going to spiffy itself out of character. If “charm” can be described as members of the café wait staff sweating out an uncommonly busy lunch crowd, El Cortez has that. In the middle of the rush, a waitress who has delivered an order of hot tea with lemon notices that the woman who made that order is drinking only the water and lemon. The teabag sits untouched in a saucer. The waitress asks if the teabag is going to be used. When told it would not be, she takes it back and does not charge for the order. Even while millions are spent improving big things at El Cortez, the little things matter.