Culinary Workers Union Local 226 members will be on the picket line this weekend to voice their dissatisfaction over the lack of new contracts with 10 downtown casinos. The union, in a media advisory posted this evening on its website, said members would picket from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. Saturday in downtown Las Vegas. Union members from Strip casinos will …
“He played fairly loose and didn’t win very often, because to him money was no object. He was into the social aspect of it. He would stay in every single hand. Even when he was slipping at the end, he was a regular player and the people loved him. He was one of the legends,” an employee at the El Cortez says of Jackie Gaughan, who died last week at age 93.
One of Downtown Las Vegas’ oldest residents, the El Cortez, will be honored for winning a listing on the National Register of Historic Places. Mayor Carolyn Goodman and Councilman Bob Coffin will headline a ceremony at 4 p.m. Thursday to unveil a commemorative plaque at the hotel/casino. The city's oldest hotel to continuously operate under the same name, the El Cortez became only the second Las Vegas casino on the nation's cultural preservation list in February.
For eight hours Beverly Hoffrichter, a cocktail waitress at the D, was picketing outside the property with her fellow Culinary Union workers as part of a massive protest outside all nine downtown casinos Saturday. Hundreds came and went in shifts during the protest, but not Hoffrichter. She stayed.
A massive protest slated Saturday in downtown Las Vegas stems, in part, from demands by the Culinary Union for a 15-cent increase to workers' health and pension funds.
At 7 a.m. on a Saturday, while most Las Vegans are still fast asleep, developer Arnold Stalk and his 9-year-old son Jacob are pulling on gardening gloves and priming paint brushes. The pair was among the 125 residents, ranging from grade school students to seniors, who volunteered last weekend to refurbish the dilapidated courtyard of downtown’s Las Vegas Academy.
Once upon a time, Jackie Gaughan owned a third of downtown Las Vegas, from resorts to real estate. He’s celebrated as a gaming innovator, a bookmaker who loved wild prop bets and revolutionized customer promotions. Yet most of the stories you hear are about his kindness, whether you’re talking to a cocktail waitress or Steve Wynn.
Downtown Las Vegas is trying to shake the city's reputation as a place that likes to blow up old buildings. It is trying to update its image without forgetting the character of its past.
The Las Vegas gaming market rebounded this year with a jump in visitor volume nearing the record total of 39.6 million in 2007. Room occupancy rates and gaming revenue are up from the depressed levels of recent years, while visitors have shifted their spending patterns, focusing an ever-larger percentage of their cash on special events and clubs rather than casino floors. So, can you brand Las Vegas a winner in 2011 despite the region’s continued battle with double-digit unemployment, record home foreclosure rates, the ever-present sense of economic uncertainty, and the continued domestic and international expansion of the casino industry?
The people clustered in Metro Police’s Downtown Area Command conference room Wednesday morning probably didn’t know one another very well. They sat at a U-shaped table with cards identifying them and their businesses or organizations: Catholic Charities, U.S. Marshals, El Cortez and the Mexican Consulate, just to name a few.