🎪 Tuesday will mark the 54th anniversary of the opening of Circus Circus. These day’s it’s generally written off as a downmarket afterthought with an inexplicably great steakhouse and a roller coaster out back. But during the casino’s first few years, its driving force, crackpot visionary Jay Sarno, invested the property with so much sheer surreal energy it’s hard to believe now, in our own era of upscale Vegas tastecore. I mean, this was a headline before it opened: “LV Circus Casino Approved; No Topless Shoeshine Girls.” Chris Lawrence's boisterous Review-Journal look-back does a fine job getting across the casino’s boundary-pushing, regulation-bending, freewheeling mix of kids’ fare (circus acts, games, animals 🐘) and racy adult diversion — including plenty of skin (one act was introduced thusly: “And now our dazzling display of devastating epidermis!”). Judging from the stories, those improbable early years were a concentrated dose of the debauchery everyone thinks Vegas is about, and it was all certainly weird enough to give Hunter S. Thompson an infamous shudder of existential dread: “The Circus-Circus is what the whole hep world would be doing Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war,” he fear and loathed.
Still: A lot of people who grew up in Vegas have early memories of Circus Circus, and rarely do they sound like the stuff of hepcat Nazi Saturdays. It was just a place kids went, first with family, later with friends. For many, the funky aura of Circus Circus no doubt served as a vivid childhood notice that our city’s idea of normal wasn’t always the same as the other cities we visited.
- 🎪 For more on Jay Sarno, UNLV’s David G. Schwartz wrote the book.
