Flamingo + The Linq / High Roller

Not actually Bugsy's idea — but the oldest resort still standing on the Strip, with a 550-foot wheel next door.

Key facts

The Flamingo was started by Hollywood Reporter publisher Billy Wilkerson, who ran short of money; mobster Bugsy Siegel and his associates took the project over and completed it — Siegel did not originate it.
The Flamingo's debut on December 26, 1946, was a flop and the resort briefly closed soon after; Siegel was shot to death months later, in June 1947, at a home in Beverly Hills, California — not at the Flamingo. A memorial to Siegel stands in the resort's garden.
The Flamingo is the oldest resort still operating on the Las Vegas Strip.
Next door, The Linq's High Roller observation wheel opened in 2014 and stands about 550 feet tall.

Narration transcript

On your right, that blaze of hot-pink neon is the Flamingo — and it comes with the most famous origin story in Las Vegas, most of which is wrong. The legend says the gangster Bugsy Siegel dreamed up the Flamingo and built glamour in the desert. The truth is more interesting: the Flamingo was actually the idea of a Hollywood magazine publisher named Billy Wilkerson, who started building it and then ran out of money. Siegel and his partners muscled in and finished the job. He took it over; he didn't invent it.

And it did not go smoothly. The grand opening, the day after Christmas in 1946, was a genuine flop — so poor the place briefly shut down. A few months later, in June of 1947, Siegel was shot and killed — not here, but at a house in Beverly Hills, California. There's a small memorial to him tucked in the resort's garden, which is about as close to Vegas as his ending actually got.

Here's the payoff, though: through all of it, the Flamingo survived. It is the oldest resort still operating on the entire Strip — the one flamingo that never got imploded.

Right next door, that giant wheel turning against the sky is the High Roller, at The Linq. It opened in 2014 and stands about five hundred and fifty feet tall — a slow, thirty-minute loop with the whole valley underneath you.

Keep driving north. On your left, watch for a resort with a volcano out front — a place that basically invented the modern Las Vegas, and that has just closed its doors to become something new.