The Sahara Casino, a Vegas Classic, Will Close in May

LAS VEGAS -- The venerable Sahara Hotel & Casino, the place where everyone from Johnny Carson to Cher has performed and the scene of countless landmarks in Vegas and show business history, will close on May 15, its owner announced today.

The 59-year-old staple of the Strip and long-ago Rat Pack magnet is "no longer economically viable," according to the statement issued by Sam Nazarian, CEO of owner SBE Entertainment.

SBE bought the 1,720-room resort in March 2007 for more than $300 million with plans to radically redevelop it as a sleek, hipster resort. Within a year, though, the city was engulfed in a brutalizing recession that shrank visitor volume to this destination and froze banks' willingness to loan to casino-hotel operators.

The statement was nebulous about SBE's future plans, making no reference to imploding the property, the spectacular demise so many legendary Vegas resorts have faced. Instead, Nazarian suggested a "complete renovation and repositioning," with no further details. Stacey Loizeaux, whose family's demolition company, Controlled Demolition Inc., has been enlisted to do every implosion on the Strip, told AOL News: "We haven't gotten the phone call yet. But I'm sure we will."

Still, it is clear that the Sahara as it has been known for much of Las Vegas history will disappear and more than 1,000 employees will be let go in mid-May. Among those shocked and in mourning are Sandy Hackett, whose father, Buddy, was a legendary force at the property for decades.

"I grew up in that hotel," said Hackett, whose Sandy Hackett's Rat Pack Show played at the Sahara with him in the role of Joey Bishop. "My first memories of Las Vegas were of the Sahara. My dad would be working and we'd look out front of hotel there was nothing but desert in all directions. I'm sad to see that this these things are happening."

Buddy Hackett was so pivotal to the Sahara's glory days as a show-biz mecca that he was made vice president of entertainment. Under his control, the showroom was home to Carson, Jack Benny, George Burns, Shecky Greene, Flip Wilson and countless others. Hackett booked David Brenner to open for Sonny & Cher the day after seeing Brenner's first "Tonight Show" appearance.

The Sahara also was where Jerry Lewis first broadcast his famous telethon for the Muscular Dystrophy Association. Its 40,000-square-foot convention center was the first exposition space in the city.

Still, the institution has fallen on hard times and disrepair, although its Speed: The Ride roller coaster and NASCAR Cafe have remained popular attractions.

The Sahara, considered the northern-most resort on the Strip, has also been surrounded by dramatic failure that made it difficult to compete and remain relevant. Most noticeably, the nearby Fontainebleau, a 68-story, 4,000-room behemoth, halted construction in 2009 after $2.9 billion had been spent and it had been topped off because lenders canceled loans. It never opened, and corporate raider Carl Icahn, who bought it for $156 million, sold off the furnishings intended for the property late last year. He has no plans to open it.

Across the street from the Sahara is a large empty plot of land upon which casino giant MGM Resorts once said it planned to build casinos and condos. To the south of the Sahara is another empty plot where developers hoped to build a sports arena and failed. Also nearby is the frame of the partially built Echelon, a planned $4.8 billion project on the site of another beloved Old Vegas haunt, the Stardust. Boyd Gaming halted Echelon construction in 2008 as the economy soured, and as yet has not set a date to restart.

The Sahara is also the northern-most stop on the Las Vegas Monorail, a 6-year-old train service that is also bankrupt.

Meanwhile, even as the recession took hold, new Vegas properties opened, all of them aiming at higher-end customers. Encore Las Vegas opened 2,000 rooms in December 2008, the $8.5 billion CityCenter complex opened in December 2009 with about 6,000 more rooms across three hotel properties, and the 3,000-room $3.9 billion Cosmopolitan bowed three months ago.

"There's a lot of excess capacity on the Strip right now," said Stephen Brown, director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. "This is sort of recognition that they're having difficulty competing with the newer competition. ... This is a recession that fell very heavily on the middle class and lower middle class, and so I think the demographic for the Sahara was just hurt more."

The announcement is likely to mobilize Vegas memorabilia aficionados, including the members of the Casino Chip and Gaming Token Collectors Club, said president Sheldon Smith. He said members would be very interested if the Sahara issued commemorative closure chips as the Stardust did before it shuttered in 2006, but either way Sahara poker chips are likely to rise in value after May.

And some big Sahara fans say they'll flock to Vegas for one last go-around at their beloved haunt. Ryan Hess, 26, of Detroit said the place had become "kind of dingy," and he wished Nazarian had invested in renovations and upgrades the way the new owners of another classic Strip joint, the Tropicana, has.

"I love the history of Vegas, so the older properties have always been much more interesting to me," Hess said. "There was no sense of pretentiousness at the Sahara. It wasn't trying to be anything it wasn't."