Columnist Dean Juipe: Old course is dying a slow death

Dean Juipe

Wednesday, June 30, 2004 | 9:53 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4084.

Once fashionable and exclusive, the Desert Inn Estates gives only token resistance these days to intruders with an inkling to roam.

"Stop," a faded sign commands at the guard shack off Paradise Road.

"Visitors Must Check With Security," it adds.

But the order carries no weight, the shack sitting vacant and its attendants long since dismissed.

This is the "back door" entry way into what was once the Desert Inn Golf Club, but both the Estates and the golf course are but skeletons of their former selves. A "No Trespassing" sign clipped to a distant fence was hardly a formidable defense as an excursion within the estates and around the perimeter of the old course on Tuesday was met with minimal opposition.

Eventually the second of a pair of security guards shooed me away, but not before I'd talked to one of the few remaining home owners, scurried over the man-made mound that is designed to keep onlookers at bay and found what I needed to know about what was once Las Vegas' most prestigious golf course.

A new golf course is being planned for where the old one sits, yet construction has not yet begun on it. Golf is but a distant priority at the sprawling site that is Wynn Las Vegas, scheduled to open next year.

In an unfortunate play on words, the old Desert Inn Golf Club is now the Deserted Inn. It is dying a slow death, patchy and barren and nothing at all like it was in its plush heyday, which wasn't all that long ago.

It's this reality that alarms residents lining the nearby Las Vegas Country Club, which may be the next target in a corporate expansion -- one that seems peculiar to Las Vegas, by the way -- that turns hallowed golf courses into hollowed shells. If the D.I. and its residents can be pushed into extinction, what's to say the Country Club won't be next?

Country Club members are being plied with quasi-competing bids offering to buy them out, in theory so that the overflow crowd from the new golf course on the old D.I. grounds will have a place to play. Thus far, members are weighing their options.

But for those who live around the Country Club and within its walls, what has happened at the Desert Inn Estates says it all. There may even be a sense of inevitability that their dream homes will one day be bulldozed for a greater prosperity.

Just past the abandoned gate shack at the old D.I. sit a handful of houses, half left to ramshackle on their own and half still sporting residents. Based on the one who anonymously spoke to me, they're not too happy for the squeeze play that is going on around them.

I believe it has been determined that they can stay if they so choose, but their view of the new golf course will be intentionally blocked and their access to utopia certainly limited.

The deteriorating condition of the adjacent homes stands in contrast to the price tags they once enjoyed and the lively times they must have seen. Debris is abundant and has multiplied to such an extreme that it's getting difficult to tell the occupied homes from those that have been sold to Wynn but have yet to be razed.

Just outside the compound and all but overhead, the newly constructed link in the evolving airport-to-downtown monorail is getting a workout and a test run by a sleek passenger vehicle. The imagery is sensational, as is its comparative value.

It's the old Las Vegas giving way to the new, breaking a few hearts in the name of progress.