Photo Essay: The Former Mansion of Liberace, Upon His 100th Birthday

Wladziu Valentino Liberace would have been 100 years old this week, if he were still alive.

"Mr. Showmanship" may have passed away 32 years ago, but his memory is still very much alive—at least in Las Vegas.



Liberace had made Vegas his home for decades—even putting his mother up in a condo in Beverly Green—but most people associate him with the "Liberace Mansion" on Shirley Street in Paradise, where he lived part-time from 1974 until his death in 1987 (though he was in Palm Springs at the time and also owned properties in Lake Tahoe, Lake Arrowhead, LA, Manhattan, and Malibu).



The entertainer had actually combined two homes to create the largest residence on the block—or probably in the whole neighborhood—the whole thing blinding in sun-bleached white stucco.



The exterior looks pretty modest now for a mansion—but when it went into foreclosure in 2010, it was in shambles. That's how its current owner managed to buy it for $500,000 in 2013.



In 2016—after a huge turnaround—the 14,393-square-foot residence (located in a pretty modest neighborhood) became first residential property to become a county Historic Landmark in Clark County, Nevada.

The European influences and imported goods abound, starting at the sidewalk with an Italian wrought-iron gate that's a century old...



...and hand-carved wooden front doors that were salvaged from a former governor's mansion (in, I believe, California—though some reports claim New York State), which have since been painted black and gold.



The lavish estate exemplifies Liberace's famous motto—"Too Much of a Good Thing Is Wonderful"—though most of the furnishings are appropriate to the star's taste but not original.



Of course, Liberace's style was known well from his elaborate stage performances, media appearances, and photo shoots.



He was an "open book" when it came to his homes, often inviting the cameras in (as well as many of his celebrity friends).



And when you tour the now-restored Liberace Mansion, you can turn any corner and see Liberace's name screaming out at you.



Many of the walls are mirrored floor to ceiling, some etched with designs in the style of Aubrey Beardsley drawings.



Others are etched with Liberace's name, signature, piano, or candelabra...



...as is the discoball-decorated bar that Liberace had installed.



The mansion's current owner lives in Liberace's former walk-in closet, partially in order to preserve the original master bedroom whose ceiling was painted like that of the Sistene Chapel.



A mirrored hall that mimics Louis XIV's Palace of Versailles—flanked by eight marble pillars imported from Greece—leads to the marble-floored master bath.

Fans recognize the "marble courtyard" with its sunken marble tub from a campy prerecorded video intro to Liberace's concerts, in which he reaches out from a bubble bath to tickle the ivories on an adjacent piano.



His 14-karat gold-plated swan fixtures still dispense water into the whirlpool bath, which reportedly cost Liberace $350,000.



Head upstairs by climbing a gilded spiral staircase that was reportedly hand-sculpted in Italy and shipped in one piece from Paris.



Did it really come from a Parisian can-can bar? I haven't been able to find a primary source for that story.



But we do know that Liberace did hold one of three residential gaming licenses in Vegas—along with Howard Hughes and Frank Sinatra. Hence the slot machines.



Out of all these opulent living areas, it's said that Liberace's favorite was the atrium on the upper floor, with its Tangier-inspired design and Moroccan copper tile. That's where he'd relax after playing one of his Vegas shows.



With as much that's been saved of Liberace's, there's also much that's been lost—and not just the piano key-tiled pool that's now covered by a banquet room.



In October 2010, the Liberace Museum—just a mile down Tropicana Avenue from the mansion—closed after 31 years. With the closure of Liberace's adjacent restaurant Tivoli Gardens, all that's left in the shopping plaza he once owned is a larger-than-life mosaic tile portrait of him.



Fortunately, some of the Liberace-owned memorabilia—including pianos and cars—have relocated to "Liberace's Garage" at the Hollywood Cars Museum...



...like his custom Bradley GT sports car (finished in gold metalflake) and a rhinestone-encrusted Rolls.

Many of the contents of the Vegas museum are now housed at the "Thriller Villa," a one-time vacation rental home of Michael Jackson that's become a tourist attraction.

Liberace had wanted to open museums in Palm Springs and the Midwest where he was born and grew up, but those never came to fruition.

And so much of what Liberace had collected over the years was auctioned off right after his passing—enough stuff to fill the LA Coliseum.

A Palm Springs auction was held in 2016 during Modernism Week—a sign, I suppose, that the Palm Springs Liberace museum will never come to fruition.

One of Liberace's favorite songs to perform was "The Impossible Dream." I guess even if your dream is impossible, that doesn't mean you shouldn't dream it.

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Photo Essay: Vegas's Atomic Historic District, In the Shadow of the Strip

[Last updated 11/5/19 7:43 PM PT]

In December 1950, President Truman established our country's first nuclear test site on the continent—at the Nevada Proving Ground (a.k.a. Nevada Test Site), formerly part of the Las Vegas Bombing and Gunnery Range.

The Atomic Energy Commission's first test occurred the following month, January 1951. And with it came a building boom in Vegas—not just hotels and casinos, but also single-family residences.

In fact, the population of Las Vegas doubled between 1950 and 1960.

The year 1951 also marks when the Beverly Green residential tract was established—though most of the houses were built primarily between 1952 and 1963.

It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2016, making it only the second historic district in Las Vegas (the first being John S. Park Neighborhood, designated in 2003).

Looking through a lens of historical and cultural significance, Beverly Green's legacy is as a former home for showgirls and other entertainers, bankers, and entrepreneurs and a concentrated area of Mid-Century Modern architecture.

But it might never have been built at all without the selection of an atomic bomb testing site located just 65 miles north.



Apparently, nobody knows why it's called Beverly Green—though you can imagine the name emerging out of a certain post-World War II idealism and Cold War escapism.



Maybe somebody had a mother or a wife named Beverly, or Ellen, or Barbara—all women's names given to streets within the tract.



The Beverly Green community was planned long before the Las Vegas Strip crept so far north. It now stands in the shadow of the northernmost hotel/casino on the Strip, the Stratosphere [Ed: rebranded "The STRAT" later in 2019].



This used to be where celebrities and other people of prominence could get away from the Strip. Liberace owned several co-ops on Rexford and would often visit his mother in the International-style condo complex (circa 1957) on the corner of Rexford and Oakey.



Other famous neighbors at one point or another included Louis Prima, who performed a nightly late night lounge act with his wife Keely Smith at the Sahara, starting in 1954.



Reportedly, the Rat Pack used to party at the 1955 midcentury ranch home of Hank Henry, a burlesque comedian who'd become good friends with Frank Sinatra.



As many of the houses show few alterations over time, you can see how even the wealthiest of Las Vegans—like E. Parry Thomas, Bank of Las Vegas President—lived simply and horizontally, just like regular people, in ranch homes with carports and gabled roofs and green lawns.



Some got fancy with ornamental breeze blocks, like at the 1956 ranch-style home of Dean Shendel—a one-time owner of Caesar's Palace—and his wife, showgirl Elaine Dunn.



Even though this was a housing tract, the houses in it were anything but cookie-cutter. Many of them were custom-built by local architects like Hugh E. Taylor and Zick and Sharp. Where else could you plop a baby blue Cinderella Ranch-style home with spelled-out house numbers (in script!) and not one but two rooftop dovecotes (a.k.a. architectural birdhouses) in 1956?

Palm Springs gets all the attention when it comes to Modernism—but Beverly Green has an outstanding example of Desert Modern architecture from 1958, right on East Canosa Avenue.



It's one of the properties where you'll find an example of the intricate metal fences that characterize the historic district.



Good landscaping can be found throughout as well.



And it wouldn't be Vegas without a little tiki thrown in—like the black and red Polynesian Ranch-style former home of gaming exec Frank Schivo, once a co-owner of the Sahara. The slanted roof makes the exotic home look like a boat.

So what does any of this have to do with the Nevada Test Site and the atomic detonations that occurred there from 1951 to 1992?

It was in 1952 that the Las Vegas valley was designated a “critical defense area” by President Harry S. Truman—thereby making it eligible for federal housing benefits, including Federal Housing Administration loans. 

The nearby booms were a boon to Las Vegas development—not only residential, as funding also came in from the U.S. government for public works improvements (utilities, roads, sewer lines, water pipelines, etc.)

Of course, that only put even more people in the path of drifting fallout and explosion-induced seismic activity—both of which the government assured Nevadans were perfectly safe and within legal limits. 

Uh huh.

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Photo Essay: Weapons Testing In the Atomic Age

While other people gamble their nights away and sleep their days away in Vegas, I try to figure out what in the world ever brought people out to the Middle of Nowhere, Nevada in the first place.

Photo: Operation Buster-Jangle -Dog test, for which troops were stationed a mere 6 miles from the nuclear blast, 1951. 

(U.S. Department of Defense, Public Domain)

And now it's clear that it wasn't just the legalized gambling—because hotel and casino owners could've been beleaguered by the atomic bomb testing that was happening above ground just 100 miles northeast of the Strip.



Instead, they turned those mushroom clouds into a tourist attraction—hosting "viewing parties" on their rooftops—and publicity stunt.



And who knows what happened to those journalists who hunkered down in the "News Nob" at Yucca Flat to watch mannequins inside various types of dwellings get blown up?



By the time I made it to the Atomic Testing Museum in Vegas this year, I'd already visited the Nevada Test Site and its Sedan Crater seven years ago. To be honest, there's a whole lot of nothing out there—because everything was blown up or subsequently removed.



So being in this museum full of artifacts—many of which were donated by former personnel stationed at the security site—really drove the experience home.



Somebody wore these exact goggles during the fifth American nuclear test series, Operation Greenhouse—though located in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and not Nevada, it was still a major event that led up to the development of the H-bomb.



The government and media alike promoted the idea that nuclear weapons could somehow be "tamed"—and they required the military and invited the public to watch them try. All they provided as protection were goggles (as above), steel helmets, and personal radiation meters.



Meanwhile, Americans were taught to be simultaneously terrified of nuclear warfare if it came from the other side. American use of these bombs, however, was considered heroic.



It's not like these guys didn't know what they were doing—they had incredibly sensitive and elaborate instrumentation to measure every single aspect of each nuclear detonation.



But if visiting the Atomic Testing Museum taught me anything, it's that the dangers to the lives of humans living nearby just came with the territory. There was no accident (like Chernobyl) or even negligence (like Santa Susana). It was deliberate.



Stray gamma rays were tracked.



Ions were analyzed.



Data was recorded.



The powers-that-be simply decided that whatever harm came to those within a certain blast radius would be less than if we didn't have nuclear weapons and got bombed by somebody else.



The best they could do was to record background radiation levels versus absorbed doses of ionizing radiation...



...and observe the effects on humans via radiation dosimetry.



You wouldn't believe how many Geiger counters were used back then and are now collected at the Atomic Testing Museum.



The entire museum is probably a radioactive isotope hotspot.




Then again, after visiting all these nuclear power plants and testing facilities and disaster sites, I'm probably already pretty contaminated.

Being born a child of the mid-1970s, the fear of nuclear war is woven into my genetic code. I remember emergency drills and bomb scares and fallout shelters in grade and middle school. I was probably taught to "duck and cover."

The Cold War didn't end until I was 14 years old. And of course now we know that the Cold War never really ended.

It just warmed up a bit.

And I would not be surprised one bit if international relations re-escalated to the point of more secret weapons testing—or worse—within my lifetime.

It may have already started.

It may have never ended entirely—though for a while, it was driven underground.

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Photo Essay: Waking Up in Vegas (On Fremont Street)

Out of all the times I've traveled to Vegas, I've always stayed at one of the hotel casinos on the Strip (or, like the Palms, Rio, and Hooters casinos, just off of it).



For this most recent trip, I figured if I wanted an authentic Vegas experience, I'd have to stay in Old Vegas—Downtown Las Vegas—the "old" strip of Fremont Street.



Two nights at the El Cortex afforded me the opportunity to stay in a national landmark (circa 1941) once owned by Bugsy Siegel...



...and wake up on Fremont Street—an area I'd only previously explored after dark.



El Cortez is technically located in the recently-designated Fremont East district...



...just a short walk from Las Vegas Boulevard...



...and the official entrance to the Fremont Street Experience.



That's where the neon The Hacienda Horse and Rider (circa 1967) greets visitors and passers-by with a silent "Howdy!" and a glittering wave. The refurbished sign was first installed by zThe Neon Museum in 1996.



These days, Fremont Street isn't quite what it used to be...



...as the now pedestrian mall (closed to motorized traffic) has been capped (with zipliners sailing above at a near-constant pace).



The "Crazy Ely" Western Village no longer sells "Indian jewelry" or moccasins, operating solely as a souvenir shop full of mostly the same crap you'll find at all the other local gift stores. But at least the statue of the gold-panning prospector still hovers over the sidewalk.



The facades of these casinos are still far more appealing to me than the Epcot-esque themed environments of, say, the Excalibur on the Strip.



I think the only casino on the strip to retain any semblance of a wraparound neon marquee is the Flamingo (also once owned by Bugsy Siegel). And that's probably an endangered species.



I loved walking around Fremont Street first thing in the morning on my way to and from breakfast...



...especially since it wasn't too early for the "showgirls" to come out.



We ended up strolling all the way down to the end—to the Golden Gate Casino (circa 1906) at One Fremont Street—and turning around and going back.

We'd hoped for pancakes at Dupar's, but the front desk told us it closed in 2013 (though in truth, it just moved to the Suncoast Hotel and Casino).

We asked the desk attendant where we could get breakfast and told him we were looking for something historic nearby.

"Uh... historic?"

He came up empty.

So we took a gamble on Magnolia's Veranda, the cafe in the Four Queens, which ended up being delightful.

By the time we headed back to the El Cortez to take our showers and get ready for the rest of the day, Fremont Street was already getting too crowded for my taste.

I can't be nostalgic for the old version of Las Vegas, because I never experienced it firsthand.

But I can try to make up for lost time by seeking out what's left of it and enjoying it while I still can.

There's already a big fat hole on Fremont Street where the Las Vegas Club and Golden Goose used to stand.

Seems like nothing can escape "progress."

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