Original 1973 MGM Grand Las Vegas History: Kirk Kerkorian's Flamingo Road Resort, the 1980 Fire & Evolution into Horseshoe

Where Was the Original 1973 MGM Grand Located Compared to Today's MGM Grand?

First-time archival researchers often assume that the thirty-story green-glass MGM Grand standing at the northeast corner of Tropicana Avenue (3799 Las Vegas Blvd S) occupies the historic 1973 site. In reality, the Tropicana Avenue parcel held the Marina Hotel and Tropicana Country Club golf course until Kirk Kerkorian broke ground there in October 1991 for a second-generation, 5,005-room resort that opened on December 18, 1993 opposite the Tropicana resort.

Kerkorian's original 1973 MGM Grand stood precisely 1.1 miles north at 3645 Las Vegas Blvd S, anchoring the prized Four Corners intersection of Flamingo Road alongside Caesars Palace, the Dunes, and the Flamingo. To assemble the forty-three-acre site prior to the April 15, 1972 groundbreaking, Kerkorian's team bought out and cleared three classic roadside properties: the Three Coins Motel, the Galaxy Motel, and the Western-themed Bonanza Hotel & Casino. As captured in the MGM Grand construction archive, the Bonanza Casino stayed open right beside the rising high-rise tower until crews demolished the Bonanza on August 6, 1973 to pave the front porte-cochere and parking plaza.

How Did Architect Martin Stern Jr. Design the World's Largest Hotel in December 1973?

Four years earlier, in July 1969, Kerkorian and architect Martin Stern Jr. had invented the modern Las Vegas megaresort template off-Strip with the 1,512-room International Hotel, before financial pressure forced Kerkorian to sell his International Leisure stock to Hilton Hotels while acquiring controlling interest in debt-laden Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios in Culver City. Determined to outbuild his own creation and monetize MGM's silver-screen heritage, Kerkorian commissioned Stern to design a twenty-six-story T-shaped hotel tower housing 2,084 rooms, briefly reclaiming the title of largest hotel in the world when doors opened on December 5, 1973.

Budgeted initially at $75 million before climbing past $106 million, the interior abandoned mid-century desert kitsch for gilded Old Hollywood opulence named directly after MGM's 1932 Best Picture winner Grand Hotel. Italian marble colonnades, hundreds of crystal chandeliers, and portraits of Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh framed a football-field-sized casino containing more than 900 slot machines and sixty table games. Unique to the Strip, the resort included a 2,100-seat Basque Jai Alai fronton where bettors wagered parimutuel tickets on 150-mph pelota matches, plus an on-site cinema screening vintage MGM classics.

Opening night featured Dean Martin christening the 1,200-seat Celebrity Room, followed on April 26, 1974 by producer Donn Arden's $4.5 million Ziegfeld Room extravaganza Hallelujah Hollywood!, a 120-dancer tribute to MGM musicals equipped with sinking hydraulic stages that simulated the Titanic disaster and featured live appearances by MGM's roaring mascot lion, Leo.

What Caused the Catastrophic November 21, 1980 MGM Grand Fire and How Did It Change U.S. Building Codes?

Shortly after 7:07 a.m. on Friday, November 21, 1980, a tile-inspection crew and bakery staff inside the ground-floor restaurant known as The Deli spotted flames erupting behind a refrigerated pastry display case. Post-fire investigators from the Clark County Fire Department and National Fire Protection Association traced the ignition to an ungrounded copper-conduit electrical short caused by constant compressor vibration inside the pie cabinet, which ignited concealed plywood wall framing and smoldered undetected inside the interstitial ceiling plenum.

Although Clark County building inspectors had urged full sprinkler coverage during 1972 plan reviews, county code at the time exempted 24-hour public assembly areas (including the main casino, restaurants, and The Deli) on the flawed assumption that round-the-clock staff would spot and extinguish any small blaze immediately. Fed by fresh air when doors opened and fueled by tons of polyurethane seat foam, PVC wiring insulation, plastic ceiling mirrors, and wall coverings, a superheated fireball raced across the 450-foot casino floor at up to nineteen feet per second, blowing out the front porte-cochere doors in less than six minutes.

While flames rarely rose above the second floor, buoyant clouds of carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide surged upward into the twenty-six-story hotel tower of roughly 3,400 sleeping guests through unsealed seismic expansion joints, elevator hoistways, laundry chutes, and HVAC air-return shafts lacking automatic smoke dampers. Worse, many interior stairwell doors locked automatically from the stairwell side once guests entered to flee smoke, trapping evacuees inside smoke-filled shafts unless they reached the ground or roof. Heroic U.S. Air Force helicopter crews from Nellis Air Force Base and Las Vegas Metropolitan Police pilots airlifted roughly 300 guests off the smoke-ringed rooftop over four hours, yet eighty-five people perished, only eighteen on the casino level and the vast majority from upper-tower smoke inhalation, with more than 650 injured.

Together with a second fatal high-rise blaze eighty-one days later at the Las Vegas Hilton on February 10, 1981, the MGM Grand catastrophe prompted the Nevada Legislature to enact Senate Bill 108 in 1981, mandating retroactive fire sprinklers, automatic HVAC smoke dampers, stairwell door unlocks, and audible room alarms across every Nevada hotel over fifty-five feet, setting the strict life-safety standard adopted nationwide across U.S. building codes.

How Did the Resort Rebuild in 1981 and Transition into Bally's Las Vegas in 1986?

Kerkorian spent $50 million over eight months gutting the blackened casino level, sealing vertical shaft penetrations, and installing tens of thousands of fire-sprinkler heads, smoke detectors, and pressurized stairwell fans. Simultaneously, crews completed a second twenty-six-story, 732-room South Tower that had already been under construction behind the main building on November 21, bringing total capacity past 2,800 rooms. The resort reopened quietly on July 29, 1981, anchored two nights later by Donn Arden's $10 million Ziegfeld Room successor, Jubilee!, whose 1,000 Bob Mackie and Pete Menefee costumes ran for thirty-four years until February 11, 2016.

In November 1985, Chicago gaming-equipment manufacturer Bally Manufacturing Corporation agreed to acquire both the Las Vegas and Reno MGM Grand hotel-casinos from Kerkorian for roughly $594 million in cash and assumed debt. Completed in April 1986, the deal settled lingering fire-litigation liabilities and rebranded 3645 Las Vegas Blvd S as Bally's Las Vegas, while shrewdly allowing Kerkorian's Tracinda Corporation to keep the MGM Grand name for his 1993 Tropicana Avenue megaresort.

Why Did Caesars Entertainment Rebrand Bally's into Horseshoe Las Vegas in December 2022?

Bally's Las Vegas passed through Hilton Hotels Corporation in 1996, spun off into Park Place Entertainment, which built the adjoining Paris Las Vegas connected directly to Bally's promenade in September 1999, and joined Harrah's Entertainment (later Caesars Entertainment) in 2005. In October 2020, Caesars sold the global intellectual property rights to the Bally's casino brand for $20 million to Rhode Island-based Twin River Worldwide Holdings, keeping a perpetual royalty-free license only if it chose not to rename the Flamingo Road property.

Rather than promote a direct corporate competitor's brand name at the busiest intersection on the Strip, Caesars looked inside its own trademark vault from its 2004 purchase of Downtown's Binion's Horseshoe. Beginning in May 2022, Caesars moved the summer World Series of Poker out of the off-Strip Rio Convention Center into the linked convention halls of Bally's and Paris, and on December 15, 2022 formally rebranded 3645 Las Vegas Blvd S as Horseshoe Las Vegas, wrapping Martin Stern Jr.'s fifty-year-old 1973 MGM Grand tower in gold horseshoe neon and hand-tooled leather.