Saturday, April 4, 1998 | 10:58 a.m.
Bart Maybie has a dream to return the Moulin Rouge to its former glory.
"This place was a wreck when I took over 10 months ago," Maybie said as he looked over rolls of carpet in the dusty casino. He paid $3 million for the hotel-casino.
The new owner already has put almost $800,000 into the renovation of the historical site. The opening is tentatively set for this fall.
The Moulin Rouge, in west Las Vegas at 900 W. Bonanza, has been through several owners who failed to keep the property open over the years.
One factor to blame is its location, which has been known for its high-crime rate. But Maybie says he is not concerned about crime since in the process of renovating the hotel-casino, he is revamping the neighborhood.
"I've cleaned up other areas before," Maybie said. "Removing crime is not easy. If you don't take control of the whole area, you're going to have crime."
Maybie bought the neighboring Desert Breeze apartments with the Moulin Rouge. He gated the area, kicked out 50 residents he said were involved in drugs and turned weekly rentals into monthly rentals.
He also won the bid on the Westwood Apartments, behind the hotel-casino, that were auctioned off by Las Vegas Housing Authority, but he is still waiting for the deal to close on the 56-unit building.
"These will be nice when they are finished," Maybie said of the apartments, which stand empty except for four units rented by the Culinary Union as a training center.
The apartments will be called Desert Breeze II and will be gated.
Maybie is working with Metro Police's Weed and Seed program, a federally funded operation that weeds out criminals and drug dealers in neighborhoods. Then social programs, such as youth activities, parenting classes and drug-prevention courses, are planted in the area.
Metro Lt. Jim Dillon, who is in charge of the program, said Maybie's neighborhood is part of the Weed and Seed effort on the city's west side.
Maybie also owns units in the Treeline Park condominiums next to Westwood. As a member of the board for the condo association, he says that he plans to clean those units up as well.
"This is a real rough area," Maybie said about Treeline Park.
But not as rough as it used to be.
"There have been a lot of changes," Candy Allen, Maybie's assistant, said. "Five years ago, you couldn't walk over to the pay phone to make a call."
Allen, who began working with previous owners of the Moulin Rouge in 1986, said she wanted to work with someone who would put money into the hotel-casino.
"Not just money," she added, "but enthusiasm for cleaning up the area and helping people. He's a real people person.
"I've seen the hotel through its struggles, I've seen the hotel when it was dilapidated, and people were living there with no roof."
The Moulin Rouge opened in 1955 as the city's first interracial resort, but closed after six months because of financial problems.
In recent years, it has been used as a nightclub, for fund-raisers and for standing-room-only boxing matches. Changing it into a museum has been mentioned.
But for most of its 43 years, the Moulin Rouge has sat empty.
Being a historic site and symbolic building to the black community, owners and residents have struggled to keep it in business.
In 1992, the Moulin Rouge was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in hopes it would receive federal funds for a much-needed renovations. But previous co-owner James Walker was denied a $9.5 million Community Development Block Grant loan from the city of Las Vegas.
Maybie, a native of Canada and Las Vegas resident for 10 years, has a reputation for refurbishing depressed property. He said he was intrigued by the Moulin Rouge and its neighborhood.
"We're compelled to keep it the same since it's a historical site," he said.
The original chandeliers are still hanging in the main casino. A painting resembling Toulouse-Lautrec posters from the original Moulin Rouge in Paris -- but featuring black showgirls -- still hangs behind the bar. Maybie says he will have 165 slot machines and eight table games in the casino.
Removing asbestos from the 351-seat theater where top black entertainers appeared was one of Maybie's first tasks. The theater saw some top black entertainers perform, with other big names such as Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr. and Lena Horne in the audience. The theater still has the hotel's original microphone cords hanging from the ceiling, but currently is storing large rolls of carpet.
James McMillan, Nevada's first black dentist, remembers the Moulin Rouge when it was young, fresh and healthy.
"It was beautiful. It was God's country," the 80-year-old said. "The hotel was beautiful, the people were beautiful."
McMillan said he hopes the reopening will be a success, but said the casino could never measure up to what it was before because of the era that framed its creation.
In the 1950s, blacks -- including entertainers -- weren't permitted in the downtown and Strip casinos. The Moulin Rouge provided a place for the black community to be entertained.
McMillan, who had just come to town when the Moulin Rouge opened, said he was married at the hotel and Billy Daniels sang the wedding march. Sinatra and Davis were in the hotel that night as well, he said.
As a member of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, McMillan said he appreciates the work that Maybie is putting into reopening, but would like to see a black running it since it's such a big part of black history.
Prominent black businessman John Edmond, owner of Nucleus Plaza, is working with Maybie on the project.
Gina Fountain, assistant director of corporate affairs for Nucleus Plaza, said that restoring the Moulin Rouge has been Edmond's vision.
"We're very proud, very excited to be working on a project that is doing things for the community and gives the younger generation something to be proud of," she said.
Fountain said plans are in the preliminary stages and don't include any definite ideas for entertainment.
"We would definitely stay in the parameters of the historic nature involving black history," she said.
Edmond heads Nucleus Plaza Inc., an organization dedicated to rebuilding and empowering the black community. She said the opening of the Moulin Rouge will help to improve the city's west side.
"The employment it brings will definitely reach out to all areas of Las Vegas, but it will definitely be helpful in offering jobs to residents in the west side," she said.
Maybie also owns the shopping center next to the hotel where he said a computer-training and employment-assistance service plans to rent space.
Allen said she expects the hotel to attract heavily from the tourist market because of its historical appeal. The local market will have an inherent interest in the hotel.
Fountain said she agrees that the hotel will be successful.
"There is a soft spot in everybody's heart because it was the first interracial casino. Black stars who performed in the main casinos but couldn't walk into the casinos had to come to the Moulin Rouge," she said. "It has sentimental value to the African-American community."
Five years after the closing, a bill to end segregation in the Strip casinos was signed at the Moulin Rouge.
"There is a lot of politics, a lot of history and a lot of stories on why it closed that nobody will ever know," Allen said.
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