LEISURE KING

Many may recall a distinctive Las Vegas icon of the 1950s: the Sands hotel signboard that loomed like a giant egg-crate grid.

"All night long, the sizzling incandescent bulbs started off like a fuse, racing their way up and around the dynamic script lettering -- S-A-N-D-S -- repeating in red neon and white chasers against the black desert sky."

So writes historic preservationist Chris Nichols in his just-released book, "The Leisure Architecture of Wayne McAllister."

Few may know that McAllister, who designed the Sands, also designed its sign. It was unusual for architects to do so.

A casualty of time and place, the Sands was imploded in 1996 to make way for The Venetian. All but two of the six Las Vegas hotel-casinos mentioned in the book -- including the original Flamingo, which McAllister didn't have a hand in -- have been destroyed by man or fire.

Surviving still are El Cortez and the Fremont, both downtown properties just blocks apart on Fremont Street.

In his book, Nichols, a Los Angeles resident, calls the Sands one of McAllister's most elegant creations. But Nichols says it was his Old West-style El Rancho, which opened in 1941, that created the blueprint for future resorts along the Strip.

The practical and unassuming McAllister didn't think his buildings would last forever, Nichols said in a phone interview.

"He wasn't a dreamer architect; he didn't think of himself as an artist architect. He thought of himself as a business architect," said Nichols, an associate editor at Los Angeles magazine and former chairman of the Los Angeles Conservancy's Modern Committee.

"He didn't do it for his own ego."

McAllister was surprised that anyone cared to spare his projects from the wrecking ball, as the author learned firsthand when the Modern Committee successfully spearheaded efforts to save his oldest remaining Bob's Big Boy restaurant, in Burbank, Calif. It was made a state landmark.

Nichols, and local preservationists, agree that location eventually doomed most of McAllister's Las Vegas hotel-casinos.

They sat on the Strip, the area's most valuable land.

Nichols isn't the only fan of this mid-century genre architect, who died seven years ago at age 92. In his book, Nichols quotes architectural historian Alan Hess: "Think of how many people have lived in, or even visited, a Frank Lloyd Wright, and then compare it to the number who have visited his (Wayne McAllister's) Las Vegas hotels. Millions of more people have been influenced and affected by their quality."

In McAllister's obituary, the Los Angeles Times reported that Hess said Los Angeles and Las Vegas would have been far drearier places without the architect's work.

A MARVEL OF VERSATILITY

Most of Nichols' book focuses on McAllister's Southern California hotels and nightspots, drive-ins and dinner houses. A chapter devoted to Las Vegas begins with El Rancho, modeled after California motels of the same name that McAllister had designed in Sacramento and Fresno for hotelier Thomas Hull.

The project, a brainchild of San Diego socialite Jack Barkley, spent some time on the drawing board. Potential investors considered it a risky venture, despite its favorable odds: casino gambling in Nevada had become legal in 1931, the Boulder Dam project provided a potential clientele of tourists, and McAllister was enjoying success from his earlier resort, the impressive Hotel Agua Caliente in Mexico.

Even Barkley got skittish and backed out of the deal, Nichols reports. Hull eventually found private financing, and El Rancho, promoted as the "Caliente of Nevada," opened.

The rambling dude ranch and casino, tucked just outside city limits along a lonely stretch of what was Highway 91, helped establish the area as a venue for celebrities and a vacation spot for Southern Californians before it burned down nearly 20 years later.

The site, across Las Vegas Boulevard from the present Sahara resort, remains vacant.

"Las Vegas had never seen anything like the El Rancho," Nichols said in the interview.

"It set the standard for each new hotel on the Strip. The place established a formula ... a type that the Las Vegas hotels all followed."

That formula, designed with the automobile in mind and partly influenced by the expansive layouts of Palm Springs resorts, featured huge billboards at the side of a highway, easy parking and wide-open green spaces.

McAllister went on to gut and rebuild the interior of El Cortez, a project bankrolled by a handful of investors, including mobster Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel. Obtaining materials during World War II, when building supplies were being rationed, somehow wasn't a problem.

The architect declined Siegel's offer to let him build the Flamingo, which became Siegel's most famous project. Instead, McAllister next designed the Desert Inn, which Nichols wrote had the same "modern but ranch-house flair" as the Flamingo.

"Some say it was not the hotel but Siegel's murder soon after its completion that brought unprecedented attention to the small gambling town in the desert," Nichols wrote.

Siegel remained a touchy subject for McAllister. When interviewed for an oral history in the early 1990s, Nichols said, the architect asked that the video camera be turned off when he was questioned about the mobster. Yet Siegel had been killed in 1947.

"He didn't want to talk about those people, the whole underworld," Nichols said.

The Desert Inn was imploded in 2002 to make way for Wynn Las Vegas. At the time, the newest section of the Desert Inn was only four years old.

McAllister next turned La Rue, a small French restaurant, into the Sands.

The last job he finished in Las Vegas was the Fremont, which opened in 1956. Nichols wrote that aside from the Strip's nine-story Riviera, "it was the first real high-rise tower in a city that became defined by them."

Nichols marvels at the versatility of McAllister, a high school dropout who designed substantial buildings decades before getting his architect's license.

"He would do something as iconic and important and world-famous as the Sands Hotel, then he would do a little bar somewhere, or a little interior remodeling," said the author.

"He was all over the place."

DELAYED RECOGNITION

Outside certain circles, McAllister didn't gain professional recognition until later in life.

Some local preservationists who were contacted by the Review-Journal didn't know his name.

That includes Andrew Kirk, an associate professor of American history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and director of Preserve Nevada, which aims to raise the awareness of existing historical structures in the state.

"The assumption is that Las Vegans are terrible at preserving their history," said Kirk. "To some extent, it's true."

There are qualifiers. Much of the state's historic development occurred in northern towns, he said, simply because large numbers of people have lived there longer. Las Vegas wasn't established until 1905; it officially became a city in 1911.

Meanwhile, viable casino properties on the Strip have immense value for new development. The Stardust is only the latest to succumb. Built in the heart of the Strip in 1964, it was blown up in March to make way for the future Echelon Place.

To a certain extent, a strong local economy is preservation's natural enemy. Virginia City began capitalizing on its historic value only after the mining boom town went bust, said Kirk, who also sits on the Las Vegas Historic Preservation Commission.

"When I got here, I was amazed that I found a pretty vibrant preservation community," he said. "What was disturbing to me was how far Las Vegas lagged behind in understanding the community and economic value of historical preservation."

But Kirk points to a recent stride: The La Concha Motel lobby, which was dismantled and donated to the Neon Museum late last year. The pieces will remain in the museum's "boneyard" until they are rebuilt into a future visitors' center.

The seashell-shaped building was another example of the postwar period, roughly defined as 1946-1960. La Concha was built in 1961 and designed by Paul Revere Williams.

"One of the things that has happened since La Concha is the awareness that there were some prominent architects that worked in Las Vegas, which should not be news," Kirk said.

"It started with Revere. Now, there is interest in other architects."

Mid-century modernism is definitely on the radar of the Atomic Age Alliance, an online community formed by Las Vegas resident Mary-Margaret Stratton, who served on the same conservancy committee in Los Angeles as Nichols.

The group sells an architectural tour booklet of local residential and commercial examples of this period. The tour includes McAllister's Fremont and El Cortez, which is undergoing some upgrades of its own. Also listed are newer buildings that aren't postwar modern, such as New York-New York.

"The signs keep that genre alive," Stratton said.

After World War II, architects embraced a new palette of materials and ideas, she said. "They had just such exuberant architecture in that period."