HOME PAGE
|
Saturday, April 01, 2000
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal
Wayne McAllister, a pioneer Strip architect, dies after fall
Los Angeles Times
LOS ANGELES -- Wayne McAllister, one of the West's greatest unsung architects who designed pioneering playlands on the Strip in Las Vegas including the original Desert Inn and Sands, has died. He was 92.
McAllister, who gained notoriety as young as 20 for his designs, died March 22 in Arcadia, Calif., when he fell and struck his head. He had continued working in his nearby Alhambra real estate sales office until the accident, historical preservationist Chris Nichols said.
As former chairman of the Los Angeles Conservancy's Modern Committee, Nichols spearheaded an exhibit of McAllister's work at the Pacific Design Center in 1998.
McAllister made his mark in Las Vegas in April 1941, five years before Bugsy Siegel completed the Flamingo, when he set the mold for the Strip. He designed the fanciful dude ranch called the El Rancho, one of the first of myriad theme hotels. It lassoed high-rollers with its chuck-wagon murals, rambling bungalows and cowpoke casino.
McAllister went on to work with Siegel on the original plans for the Desert Inn designed in 1956. He also designed the Sands, the setting for entertainment by and for Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin's Rat Pack, and a couple of Las Vegas' oldest still-standing hotel casinos, the Fremont and the Horseshoe.
His popularity mushroomed in the neighboring state of California as well where he is hailed for his design of circular kitchens and landmark eateries ranging from the Cinegrill supper club in Hollywood to a concrete crescent Bob's Big Boy in the Toluca Lake area of Los Angeles.
In 1992, the Conservancy committee led efforts to have the Bob's Big Boy declared a California State Point of Historical Interest. The building, the third Bob's ever built and the oldest still in existence, is considered an excellent transitional example of 1940s Moderne architectural style melding toward the 1950s "coffee shop modern" endemic to Los Angeles.
"As far as I was concerned," McAllister said at the time of the 1998 exhibit, "I just ran a modest office and did modest work. It didn't deserve any special publicity or attention at the time."
He often said he simply tried to design things to fulfill a need and that his eye-catching futuristic buildings were "influenced by the automobile, not the architect."
But architectural historian Alan Hess, who praised McAllister in two books, "Viva Las Vegas" and "Googie: Fifties Coffee Shop Architecture," and lectured during the McAllister exhibit, said both Las Vegas and Los Angeles would have been far drearier places without the architect's work.
McAllister is survived by his wife of 75 years, Corinne, and three children, Donald, David and Paulette.
E-mail this story to a friend:
Give us your FEEDBACK on this or any story.
BEST OF LAS VEGAS
Fill out our Online Readers' Poll
|
Printable version of this story
|
