An Obituary
The Castaways opened September 1, 1963 at 3320 South Las Vegas Boulevard — directly across the Strip from the Sands — on land that had been a motor court called the San Souci since the 1930s. Investor Ben Jaffe bought the property after a string of bankruptcies, gutted it, and rebuilt it as a Polynesian-themed resort. He kept the chain-of-failures going, just with better lighting.
The signature attraction was not a tiki god. It was a temple. The 1904 St. Louis Jain Temple — an actual century-old religious structure that had been built for the World’s Fair — was crated up and shipped to the Strip, where Jaffe reinstalled it on the property and renamed it the Gateway to Luck. Patrons walked through a Jain temple to gamble in Las Vegas. Inside, the bar had a 1,500-gallon aquarium and a showroom built around a sexually suggestive revue called Bottoms Up, in which a young Redd Foxx — still years from Sanford and Son — worked the crowd.
The casino closed four times in its first four years. Howard Hughes bought it in 1967, his third Vegas property in two months, as part of the strange purchasing spree he ran from his sealed penthouse at the Desert Inn. The Castaways limped along through the Summa Corporation years on the strength of cheap rooms, cheap shows, and the temple out front.
In 1986, Steve Wynn bought the property and the lot next door. The Castaways closed on July 20, 1987 and was demolished within months. The Jain temple was disassembled and shipped to the Jain Center of Southern California in Buena Park, where it stands today. The site became The Mirage — Wynn’s first mega-resort, which opened November 22, 1989 with an erupting fake volcano out front.
The Mirage closed in July 2024. The volcano is dark now. Hard Rock is renovating the property. Three demolitions in 60 years on the same lot. The only artifact that survived all of them was the temple.
