On the other end of the spectrum, a fairly nondescript building at 115 E. There’s no chance that giant pyramid was ever known as, say, Cactus Larry’s. Your elaborately themed resorts - Caesars Palace, Circus Circus, New York-New York, Paris Las Vegas, Luxor, The Venetian - obviously still have their original names. Right, redesigned Golden Gate Casino and Hotel Sal Sagev, 1965. Left, Golden Gate (then Hotel Nevada) in 1906. In 1955, the hotel’s casino was christened the Golden Gate, long before the hotel took that name.

That became known as the Sal Sagev (“Las Vegas” spelled backwards) in 1931, a name that somehow hung around for decades. The following year, it was replaced by a concrete structure, the Hotel Nevada. Later that year, he opened a tent hotel, known as the Miller Hotel or Miller’s Hotel. Miller is said to have arrived on the first train into the city in 1905. Rebranding resorts and casinos is a practice nearly as old as Las Vegas itself. Binion's Horseshoe neon sign photographed from Fremont Street on Dec. (It isn’t just the resorts that change names.) That’s when the Horseshoe name was carved out and mothballed locally, and Binion’s Horseshoe, which only existed because Benny Binion renamed the Eldorado Club and Hotel Apache in his honor, became known simply as Binion’s.

That switch will be possible because the current Bally’s, which had been the MGM Grand - not to be confused with the current MGM Grand, parts of which used to be The Marina - is being renamed The Horseshoe.Ĭaesars Entertainment owns the current Bally’s as well as the Horseshoe name, which it acquired when it bought Binion’s Horseshoe back when Caesars Entertainment was known as Harrah’s Entertainment. Elsewhere on the Strip, Bally’s Corp., which somehow doesn’t own Bally’s and never did (that was the unrelated Bally Manufacturing), is in the process of acquiring the Tropicana, which it’s expected to call Bally’s.

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