Columnist Susan Snyder: Bidding farewell to a Landmark

Friday, July 26, 2002 | 2:15 a.m.

Vanessa Lagdamen is going to miss the milkshakes.

"You guys are really going out of business? Oh why? You guys have the best milkshakes," the Marriott employee said to Betty Littley, cashier at Las Vegas' Landmark Pharmacy.

"All three Marriotts recommend this place to guests."

Come Aug. 16 residents and guests will have to go elsewhere. The Landmark Pharmacy on Convention Center Drive (a block east of the Strip) is closing.

"All these older people come in here every single day to get their donuts," Littley said. "I'm going to miss these people."

No one who works there now could say, exactly, how long the Landmark has been open. It first appears in the Las Vegas telephone book in January 1962.

It's the last of a breed -- one of those stores where people could mail a letter, wire something via Western Union, order breakfast, and buy prescriptions, gifts, greeting cards and other sundries.

Over the years, the original lunch counter was replaced with a grocery section, but the ice cream still was hand-dipped and the sandwiches made-to-order. Lola Lovell recalls the old counter. She and her husband moved to a nearby apartment when he retired in the early 1960s.

"My husband used to come in for coffee every morning and afternoon," she said.

Lovell went to Landmark on Wednesday morning to pick up some stamps and have a prescription filled.

"I hate to see this go," she told Mike Bauer, who runs the post office window. "It's a sign of the times, and I don't like it."

David Thompson, the owner and a pharmacist who has worked at the Landmark for 16 years, said he bought it 10 years ago because he "wanted it to continue on."

"I felt it was something I should pursue," Thompson said. " I believe the store would have closed then if I hadn't (bought it)."

But independent pharmacies, like other specialty stores, struggle to survive in a retail industry based on the big-box theory. The days of the family owned drug store are mostly gone.

"The independent pharmacy is a very different business these days," Thompson said.

And not a very lucrative one. Walgreens, Sav-On Drug and Rite Aid all have three dozen or more stores in the valley. A one-man show like Landmark can't keep up.

Lovell recalls it as a place frequented by the Strip's showgirls and other entertainers who stayed in the Blair House nearby. Even Elvis' prescriptions were filled here.

Customers' faces also were well-known in recent years, but for different reasons.

"If I don't see some of them every few days, I worry," Littley said. She looked out the window and spotted a man with a walker slowly making his way across the parking lot.

"Here comes old Ed," she said. "He can hardly walk, but he comes in here every single day."

Lovell also walks to the Landmark. Many of the older customers no longer drive, she says, and no other pharmacy within walking distance offers so much. It's more than stamps and prescriptions.

"It's like family," she said as Thompson filled her order. "You were treated as if you are part of this group."