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Holiday Inn / Slot Joynt / Viscount / Boardwalk Hotel & Casino

The Strip's first Holiday Inn (1966) developed into the Boardwalk Hotel & Casino. 3740-3750 Las Vegas Blvd S.

Holiday Inn ('66-'85)

’65-66: Holiday Inn was built on previously undeveloped land, opened Feb. ’66 with a 6-floor tower later known as the “Steeplechase” tower. Homer Rissman, architect. Local 226 Culinary and Local 165 Bartenders picket the business from Mar. through Fall '66.

’68: 4-story addition later known as the “Luna Park” wing opens behind Steeoplechase wing.

’72: Norbert Jansen opens Holiday Gifts at the hotel. Whether Jansen was involved with Holiday Inn prior is unknown. Jansen runs the business here until his death in ’97.

’77: Holiday Gifts begins doing business as Slot Joynt Casino. The casino operates as Slot Joynt in front of the hotel in a new building until rebranding as Boardwalk in '89.

Viscount Hotel ('85-'89)

’85: Viscount and Holiday Gifts (Jansen) acquire the hotel and rebranded Viscount Hotel (RJ 6/16/85). Hotel and casino, separate until now, establish physical connection.

Boardwalk Hotel & Casino ('89-'06)

’89: hotel and casino rebranded as Boardwalk Hotel & Casino in Feb. Jansen proposes the addition of a 21-story working slot machine. This idea was rejected by the Clark County Commission. Revised plans by architect Weldon Simpson are approved, but never built.

’94: Boardwalk Casino Inc goes public, begins partnership with Holiday Inn, renamed Holiday Inn Boardwalk.

’95: Dreamland tower addition.

’96: Coney Island-themed expansion.

’98: Wynn/Mirage purchase.

’00: MGM-Mirage merge.

’03: Holiday Inn affiliation ends, renamed Boardwalk Hotel & Casino.

’06: closed 1/06; tower demolished 5/06, replaced with City Center’s Mandarin Oriental.

Sources include Boardwalk timeline published by MGM-Mirage. Boardwalk Hotel and Casino Records (MS-00093), UNLV Special Collections & Archives.

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Children playing on an abandoned car in the South Bronx in 1970

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The darkest nights are over. May your new year be filled with guiding light and good stories.

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Vincent Price and Gene Tierney Laura (1944) dir. Otto Preminger

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Book Review: Isabella Stewart Gardner: A Life by Nathaniel Silver & Diana Seave Greenwald

Author: Nathaniel Silver & Diana Seave Greenwald Title: Isabella Stewart Gardner: A Life Publication Info: Princeton University Press (2022) Summary/Review: This biography of Boston art collector and museum founder Isabella Stewart Gardner is an official publication of the museum named for her.  This means that there is an impetus for the authors to present Gardner in a good light.  This said,…

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Book Review: In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan

Author: Richard Brautigan Title: In Watermelon Sugar Publication Info: Delta/Dell (1968) Other Books I’ve Read By the Same Author: The Pill Versus The Springhill Mining Disaster The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 Trout Fishing in America The Tokyo-Montana Express Summary/Review: In the late 1980s there was a revival of Sixties culture in the United States. This manifested in the…

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My dearest, darlingest Dunkin' employees,

First of all, let me express my love for you. If it were up to me, you would all make $100 an hour. You are the backbone of Massachusetts, and don't ever forget that.

Now that's out of the way, can I make one small request? Keep in mind, I have never done what you do, so perhaps I am just speaking with no knowledge, but if I could ask: when you put my Boston cream donut in the bag, would you be able to place it frosting side up? Not that the chocolate doesn't make the paper delicious, I just feel that it belongs better on the donut.

Thank you. I love you.

Sincerely,

A humble MA resident

PS: I am loving the almond croissant. Please tell me it's not just seasonal!

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Book Review: Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire

Author: Gregory Maguire Title: Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West Narrator: John McDonough Publication Info: Recorded Books, Inc., 2000 (originally published in 1995) Summary/Review: I read Wicked over two decades ago, and my impression at the time was that it was a clever concept but it got bogged down in with long stretches of debates among the characters about politics,…

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365 Movies in 365 Days: Neighbours (1952)

This year I’m trying to watch one movie every day of the year, with the provision that the movie be no longer than 36-1/2 minutes long. I’ll be selecting movies randomly from this list that’s already way too long, but I still welcome suggestions for short films. Title: Neighbours Release Date: January 1, 1952 Director: Norman McLaren Production Company: ONF | NFB Main Cast: Grant Munro –…

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@ariel-seagull-wings @the-blue-fairie @thealmightyemprex

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When you have multiples of the same vintage postcards, you can slice them up and put them back together and make mail art.

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if you are a normal sized human being who overdrafts at the bank youd have to pay a fee or fine but if your a giant you'd pay a fo or fum

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Cowgirl, 1948 by Nina Lee.

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On the road leading into the center of Concord, Massachusetts, there sits a house.

It is a plain, colonial-style house, of which there are many along this road. It has sea green and buff paint, a historical plaque, and one of the most multi-layered stories I have ever encountered to showcase that history is continuous, complicated, and most importantly, fragmentary, unless you know where to look.

So, where to start? The plaque.

There's some usual information here: Benjamin Barron built the house in 1716, and years later it was a "witness house" to the start of the American Revolution. And then, something unusual: a note about an enslaved man named John Jack whose epitaph is "world famous."

Where is this epitaph? Right around the corner in the town center.

It reads:

God wills us free; man wills us slaves. I will as God wills; God’s will be done. Here lies the body of JOHN JACK a native of Africa who died March 1773 aged about 60 years Tho’ born in a land of slavery, He was born free. Tho’ he lived in a land of liberty, He lived a slave. Till by his honest, tho’ stolen labors, He acquired the source of slavery, Which gave him his freedom; Tho’ not long before Death, the grand tyrant Gave him his final emancipation, And set him on a footing with kings. Tho’ a slave to vice, He practised those virtues Without which kings are but slaves.

We don't know precisely when the man first known only as Jack was purchased by Benjamin Barron. We do know that he, along with an enslaved woman named Violet, were listed in Barron's estate upon his death in 1754. Assuming his gravestone is accurate, at that time Jack would have been about 40 and had apparently learned the shoemaking trade from his enslaver. With his "honest, though stolen labors" he was then able to earn enough money to eventually purchase his freedom from the remaining Barron family and change his name to John, keeping Jack as a last name rather than using his enslaver's.

John Jack died, poor but free, in 1773, just two years before the Revolutionary War started. Presumably as part of setting up his own estate, he became a client of local lawyer Daniel Bliss, brother-in-law to the minister, William Emerson. Bliss and Emerson were in a massive family feud that spilled into the rest of the town, as Bliss was notoriously loyal to the crown, eventually letting British soldiers stay in his home and giving them information about Patriot activities.

Daniel Bliss also had abolitionist leanings. And after hearing John's story, he was angry.

Here was a man who had been kidnapped from his home country, dragged across the ocean, and treated as an animal for decades. Countless others were being brutalized in the same way, in the same town that claimed to love liberty and freedom. Reverend Emerson railed against the British government from the pulpit, and he himself was an enslaver.

It wouldn't do. John Jack deserved so much more. So, when he died, Bliss personally paid for a large gravestone and wrote its epitaph to blast the town's hypocrisy from the top of Burial Hill. When the British soldiers trudged through the cemetery on April 19th, 1775, they were so struck that they wrote the words down and published them in the British newspapers, and that hypocrisy passed around Europe as well. And the stone is still there today.

You know whose stone doesn't survive in the burial ground?

Benjamin Barron's.

Or any of his family that I know of. Which is absolutely astonishing, because this story is about to get even more complicated.

Benjamin Barron was a middle-class shoemaker in a suburb that wouldn't become famous until decades after his death. He lived a simple life only made possible by chattel slavery, and he will never show up in a U.S. history textbook.

But he had a wife, and a family. His widow, Betty Barron, from whom John purchased his freedom, whose name does not appear on her home's plaque or anywhere else in town, does appear either by name or in passing in every single one of those textbooks.

Terrible colonial spelling of all names in their marriage record aside, you may have heard her maiden name before:

Betty Parris was born into a slaveholding family in 1683, in a time when it was fairly common for not only Black, but also Indigenous people to be enslaved. It was also a time of war, religious extremism, and severe paranoia in a pre-scientific frontier. And so it was that at the age of nine, Betty pointed a finger at the Arawak woman enslaved in her Salem home, named Titibe, and accused her of witchcraft.

Yes, that Betty Parris.

Her accusations may have started the Salem Witch trials, but unlike her peers, she did not stay in the action for long. As a minor, she was not allowed to testify at court, and as the minister's daughter, she was too high-profile to be allowed near the courtroom circus. Betty's parents sent her to live with relatives during the proceedings, at which point her "bewitchment" was cured, though we're still unsure if she had psychosomatic problems solved by being away from stress, if she stopped because the public stopped listening, or if she stopped because she no longer had adults prompting her.

Following the witch hysteria, the Parrises moved several times as her infamous father struggled to hold down a job and deal with his family's reputation. Eventually they landed in Concord, where Betty met Benjamin and married him at the age of 26, presumably having had no more encounters with Satan in the preceding seventeen years. She lived an undocumented life and died, obscure and forgotten, in 1760, just five years before the Stamp Act crisis plunged America into a revolution, a living bridge between the old world and the new.

I often wonder how much Betty's story followed her throughout her life. People must have talked. Did they whisper in the town square, "Do you know what she did when she was a girl?" Did John Jack hear the stories of how she had previously treated the enslaved people in her life? Did that hasten his desperation to get out? And what of Daniel Bliss; did he know this history as well, seeing the double indignity of it all? Did he stop and think about how much in the world had changed in less than a century since his neighbor was born?

We'll never know.

All that's left is a gravestone, and a house with an insufficient plaque.

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Song of the Week: "Space Cow" by Moon Hooch, Too Many Zooz, MOON ZOOZ

Moon Hooch, Too Many Zooz, MOON ZOOZ – “Space Cow” Moon Hooch and Too Many Zooz come together as MOON ZOOZ!  The two New York City trios feature saxophones and drums on music that blends jazz and electric dance music, sometimes called “Brass House.”  Both outfits got their start busking on New York subway platforms. Songs of the Week for 2025 January “Reflection” by Albertine Sarges “Orlando in…