Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

This Place:

75-year-old hotel is light-years from Vegas

This Place

Steve Marcus

Innkeeper Roger Shoaff operates the Boulder Dam Hotel with his wife, Roseanne. The hotel was built for government officials who came to check on the Hoover Dam.

This is as close as you’re going to get to old America in a place with barely a century of history.

The Boulder Dam Hotel is part museum and part boutique hotel, one of the only small hotels in a region dominated by 3,000-room megaresorts.

It has a quaint dining room with wood furniture, a dimly lighted bar in the basement and narrow halls with creaking floors that take you to comfy rooms.

Roger Shoaff, 53, and his wife, Roseanne, take care of everything. His job title is innkeeper, a word that appropriately brings to mind the days of train travel and communal bathrooms.

Clark County law all but bans bed-and-breakfasts, leaving the 20-room Boulder Dam Hotel with a corner on the niche market of places to stay where an innkeeper roams the halls.

“People appreciate that it hasn’t gone commercial,” says Shoaff, a burly man with a quick half-smile that seems to ask whether everything’s all right. “It’s homey and genteel.”

The hotel, built in 1933 for government officials who came to check on construction of the Boulder (now Hoover) Dam, became famous for housing a recuperating Howard Hughes in 1943 after he crashed a plane into Lake Mead and for providing a room to a vacationing Bette Davis in 1934.

It’s this history and the tiny town surrounding it that attract tourists and residents. “They want to be part of the kind of community Boulder City is,” says Michael Green, a history professor at the College of Southern Nevada who got married at the hotel.

Today the hotel is owned by the nonprofit Boulder Dam Museum and keeps an occupancy rate of more than 70 percent. The economy hasn’t hurt business much because the hotel doesn’t have a lot of competition in the “real Americana” hotel category, Shoaff says.

The Shoaffs moved to Nevada from Pittsburgh nearly four years ago. They came for the same reasons most everyone comes, new opportunities in a new place, where it doesn’t snow.

He taught high school at first after a long career in marketing. Then he took this job, mostly because it was offered. His wife is the other half of the management team. They live in a 900-square-foot apartment in the hotel.

This month the Shoaffs reopened the bar and restaurant, which had been closed since June. They had gone through a series of managers in the past decade.

The museum is spending $180,000 to upgrade the kitchen and give the dining room a face lift.

Shoaff acknowledges this is the worst time to open a restaurant, especially one attached to a hotel. But the space is just sitting there. And he knows the tight-knit community will come for meals, as will Las Vegans eager for a dollop of history.

He has his pitch down: “You can come to Boulder City with a gallon of gas and be in a different world,” one with narrow streets and businesses that close at night.

When the Shoaffs want to get away, they go the other way. They head to the Strip, usually Planet Hollywood.

Apparently history isn’t everything.

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