The Desert Inn was owned for a time by famed wacky billionaire Howard Hughes. In 1966, Hughes booked the top two floors of the place for ten days...and when the ten days were up, he declined to leave. The proprietors of the hotel wanted him out. Even though he was paying for his lodging, they were in the business of renting to gamblers who'd lose money in the casino, not to rich folks who stayed holed-up in their rooms. Hughes eventually solved the impasse by buying the whole Desert Inn for $14 million, which at the time was around double what the place seemed to be worth. (Next year, there will be individual paintings on the property that cost that much.) Eventually, Hughes purchased other Vegas hotels, including the Frontier — aka The New Frontier — right across the street.
At one point, Mr. Hughes decided he wanted to be able to go back and forth between the Desert Inn and the Frontier but — of course — he was not about to go out and cross Las Vegas Boulevard like any normal human being. So...at considerable expense, he had a tunnel built under the Strip, connecting his two establishments. It cost a couple million and apparently, Hughes never got around to using it himself. In fact, some say he never got around to setting foot in the Frontier or several of the other hotels he owned, like the Sands, the Landmark, the Silver Slipper and Castaways, all of which have since been levelled. But the Desert Inn-Frontier tunnel was used for a few years by employees of both establishments. Wayne Newton tells stories of how he would do his show at the Desert Inn and then, because the headliner at the Frontier was out sick, he'd dash over via the tunnel and fill in across the street.
In the seventies, someone decided that vibrations from the traffic above had dangerously weakened the tunnel structure so they closed it down.
The bringdown of the Desert Inn probably seals off one side of it forever
and any day now, when a deal is finally put in place to implode the Frontier, that will close it off from the other side. Before that happens, someone had better check to make sure Shecky Greene isn't down there.