House finds a new home

Daniela Mohor

Monday, Oct. 1, 2001 | 8:42 a.m.

The biggest show Sunday wasn't on a stage anywhere in Las Vegas. It wound along the streets of downtown.

Standing at their windows or balconies, residents and tourists clapped as a truck pulled a 90-foot-long house loaded on steel beams toward Ninth Street and Bridger Avenue.

At each major intersection, police motorcycles stopped traffic while the moving crew lifted the phone and cable TV lines, loosened the traffic signals, and turned them sideways to allow the house to make its way.

The building, known as the Morelli House, is the new home of the nonprofit Junior League. On Sunday the league moved it from its original location on the Desert Inn Country Club golf course to its new site downtown.

"It ended up being a difficult patient," Junior League President Louise Helton said of the move. "It's like when you have a tooth extracted and you don't realize it would be hard to remove."

The house, a futuristic ranch-style home, was built in 1959 by Antonio Morelli, the music director at the Sands hotel in the 1950s and '60s.

It is 3,300 square feet and contains luxurious decorations, including a fireplace with a floating concrete hearth and a marble background.

The league received the historic house last year, when its owner, Kay Glenn, sold the home lot to Steve Wynn, who is building a new resort on the site of the Desert Inn. Glenn and Wynn were looking for a way to preserve the historic house, and the league had just lost its planned headquarters in a fire.

"We were fortunate that Mr. Kay Glenn decided to donate it to our organization," Helton said. "We will make sure the entire community will enjoy it."

In addition to hosting the league's headquarters, the Morelli House will become an art gallery and provide recital space for students of the Las Vegas Academy. It will also be available as part of historic tours of downtown.

The opening of the house is scheduled for Valentine's Day, giving the league just enough time to restore it, do some landscaping work and furnish it. All of the work will be financed through grants and donated labor.

Security guards will watch the house during the restoration period to avoid possible squatting and other incidents, such as the fire that destroyed the Whitehead House in July 2000.

That historic house was to be the home of the league's offices, but it burned down three months before the organization was to move it to the lot at Ninth and Bridger.

Officials identified vagrants as the cause of the fire, Helton said.

"We don't want to lose another house," she said. "Having a home of our own gives us more identity within the community."