Kip D.
Sadly, old school Las Vegas is gone forever. Nearly all of the famous hotel names that dotted the Vegas Strip during the Rat Pack era - places like the Sands, the Stardust, the Frontier - have been replaced by monstrous, family-oriented mega-hotel resorts and kiddie playlands. Now your family can watch a pirate show, but the real "pirates" are gone.
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My favorite of all the old school Vegas joints was The Algiers Hotel & Lounge. It was located a block north of The Riviera. By the late 1980s, The Algiers had fallen from grace; the place had probably never been updated since its debut in 1953. So, as a hotel, it was really more of a motel, and a rather cheesy one at that. But the cocktail lounge -- Oh, THE COCKTAIL LOUNGE!!
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The Algiers Cocktail Lounge hadn’t been updated either, and that made it GREAT! What’s bad news for a hotel is good news for a cocktail lounge. Freshen up the hotels, but leave the lounges alone!
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The Algiers cocktail lounge was dark and quiet, and trapped in time. You couldn’t possibly remain in the Algiers lounge, sipping a Martini, Salty Dog, Manhattan or Old Fashioned for 20 minutes, without forgetting that outside it was daylight, 100 degrees in the shade, and traffic was coursing up and down the Vegas Strip. Walking into the Algiers lounge was like stepping into the Twilight Zone! Every time the door opened and a shaft of sunlight suddenly shot into the place, momentarily splitting the dark room in two, it was easy to believe that you were about to see Frankie, Sammy, Deano and the rest of The Rat Pack enter the lounge!
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The Algiers was not retro-Rat Pack, it wasn’t designed to “look” like an old-time cocktail lounge -- it WAS an old-time cocktail lounge! It was the real deal, and a great place to debate a bartender about who had the better pitching staff, the 1963 Los Angeles Dodgers or the 1969 New York Mets.
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The Algiers was a little piece of old school Vegas that time forgot... for awhile. I bought an Algiers Hotel T-shirt from m00nshot to help me travel back in time. The shirt arrived quickly, it's well crafted and it's very comfortable. It's like wearing Mr. Peabody's Wayback Machine!
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~ Kip
