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Derek Stevens

Derek Stevens is a casino developer whose Las Vegas career has centered on Fremont Street. With his brother and business partner Greg, he moved from investing in the small Golden Gate to remaking Fitzgeralds as the D and building Circa, a resort designed around sports viewing and wagering.

A Detroit native, Stevens studied at the University of Michigan and earned an MBA at Wayne State University. He came to Las Vegas as a visitor long before becoming an operator, often arranging trips around boxing matches, football weekends and basketball tournaments. In interviews, he has described moving an investment portfolio to Nevada in 2006 and looking for a business he could help run. An investment in the Golden Gate gave him that opportunity. He recalled buying a half-interest in the property and using the modest downtown hotel as a practical education in rooms, drinks, table games and slot machines.

The next steps were larger but remained concentrated downtown. Stevens bought Fitzgeralds in 2011 and relaunched it as the D in 2012, a name associated with both Derek and his Detroit roots. The former courthouse site became the Downtown Las Vegas Events Center, an outdoor venue for concerts, gatherings and sports watch parties. By the time Circa opened in 2020, he had experience both operating older casinos and drawing crowds to large shared events. His approach tied individual buildings into a group of nearby destinations, each contributing customers and activity to Fremont Street.

Circa made that strategy unusually visible. Its multilevel sportsbook and pool amphitheatre placed watching games at the center of the resort experience, carrying forward interests Stevens had developed as a visitor. The casino and amenities opened in October 2020, followed by the hotel and rooftop lounge in December. It was downtown’s first newly built integrated resort in four decades. Stevens’s connection to the Golden Gate, the D and Circa explains why his name appears repeatedly in accounts of modern downtown redevelopment: these are successive stages of one operating career. They also show three different kinds of change, from investment in a historic hotel to the rebranding of an existing casino and construction of an entirely new resort.

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