In what year was Caesars Palace established on the Las Vegas Strip?

Caesars Palace is one of Las Vegas's largest and best known landmarks on the Las Vegas Strip. It was established in 1966 by Jay Sarno, who sought to create an opulent facility that gave guests a sense of life during the Roman Empire.

Las Vegas set itself apart from the world’s gaming hot spots like Reno and Monte Carlo in the 1950s and garnered headlines and greater gaming revenue in the 1960s. Properties like the Flamingo, Dunes, Sands, Stardust, and Desert Inn made huge profits that were regularly skimmed away by the Mob.

The Mafia’s greed sent Las Vegas into a period of flat gaming revenue in the late 1960s and 1970s caused mostly by a relative lack of growth.

One exception in the ‘60s was Jay Sarno’s dream of building an opulent, glitzy casino that truly catered to wealthy players. Sarno spent more than a million dollars on the grand opening featuring Roman columns and a logo depicting a woman feeding grapes to a man in a toga.

The feast included scantily-clothed cocktail servers who delivered 50,000 glasses of champagne, 300 pounds of chunk crab, 3,500 pounds of filet mignon and enough caviar to fill dozens of bathtubs.

The cocktail servers were instructed to greet their guests with a single statement, “Welcome to Caesars Palace, I am your slave.”

Caesars Palace is now owned by Vici Properties. As of July 2016, the luxury hotel complex has almost 4,000 rooms & suites in six towers and a convention facility of over 300,000 square feet (28,000 m2).