So picture this: a trip to Australia to visit his daughter, sometime in the early 1990s, and Bob Stupak sees the Sydney Tower — a slender observation spire rising high above the city — and comes home to Las Vegas wanting to build his own version of it. What started as a simple, practical problem — a windstorm had just knocked down his old Vegas World sign, and he needed a replacement — turned, in Stupak’s hands, into something enormously bigger: not a new sign, but a tower. He took a proposal for a 1,400-foot structure to the Las Vegas City Council; the Federal Aviation Administration eventually forced the height down to just over 1,100 feet, worried about interference with planes ferrying gamblers into McCarran Airport. Stupak wanted a roller coaster at the top, and a King Kong-themed ride with passengers riding inside a giant ape scaling the tower’s exterior. The King Kong ride never got built. Almost everything else, somehow, did.
A Fire Before It Even Opened
Construction on the Stratosphere Tower began in February 1992, and it very nearly ended in disaster before a single guest ever set foot inside. On August 29, 1993, with the tower about halfway built, a fire broke out high in its unfinished pedestal, sending flames and a shower of embers visible for miles across the valley. A police officer on an unrelated traffic stop was reportedly the first to spot the flames ringing the top of the structure. A series of explosions rattled the area over several city blocks; witnesses disagreed on whether the blasts came before or after the fire was first noticed. Dozens of nearby businesses, motels, and apartments were evacuated in a three-to-four-block radius — but not the Vegas World hotel directly adjacent to the burning tower, since fire officials judged the hotel itself the safest place for those guests to shelter rather than send them out into the chaos below. A massive construction crane, badly needed for the coming cleanup, was found heavily damaged and inoperable. The fire burned itself out by sunrise. Newspapers ran the images under headlines like “the towering inferno,” and for a man whose entire career ran on turning publicity into an asset, this was the rare kind of publicity that worked directly against him.
The tower fire carried an eerie echo, too — it came almost exactly nineteen years after Stupak’s very first Las Vegas property, the World Famous Historic Gambling Museum, had burned down in 1974, an earlier fire insurers had alleged Stupak set himself. Nobody accused him of setting this one; the Stratosphere fire was investigated as an accident tied to construction work. But it’s hard not to notice that fire kept finding Bob Stupak’s buildings at exactly the moments they mattered most.
Broken, in a Coma, and Nursed Back by an Ex
The project’s real crisis came a year and a half later, and it had nothing to do with construction. On March 31, 1995 — twenty-one years to the day after he’d opened his very first Las Vegas casino — Stupak crashed his Harley-Davidson at roughly 60 miles per hour on Rancho Road, with his 19-year-old son Nevada riding along and surviving the wreck as well. Bob Stupak was left in critical condition, his skull fractured, both arms and a leg broken, and — in the detail that stuck with everyone who saw him afterward — every bone in his face fragmented. He slipped into a coma that lasted close to two weeks. Doctors reportedly did not expect him to survive.
He did, in large part with help from Phyllis McGuire — the singer, formerly of the McGuire Sisters, who’d been Stupak’s on-and-off companion through the early 1990s and who took him into her Rancho Circle home, kept him under round-the-clock armed security, and personally nursed him through his recovery even though the two had actually broken up roughly a year before the accident. “I don’t know how anyone could have survived,” she said afterward. “Every bone in his face was fragmented. It was worse than anything you could see in a horror movie.” Stupak’s rehabilitation ran in parallel with the Stratosphere’s own increasingly troubled final stretch of construction, its costs climbing, its debts mounting, and Stupak himself facing potential gaming-regulation fines as high as $2.9 million tied to his old vacation-coupon promotions — fines that were ultimately settled for a much smaller amount while he was still recovering in McGuire’s home.
Open, Then Gone Within a Year
The Stratosphere finally opened on April 30, 1996, touted at the time as a $550 million project and the third most expensive hotel-casino ever built in Las Vegas — 1,149 feet tall, the tallest freestanding observation tower in the United States, complete with a revolving restaurant, indoor and outdoor observation decks, and thrill rides including the Big Shot, X-Scream, and Insanity. By the time it opened, Stupak’s own ownership stake had shrunk to just 17 percent of the company; poker friend and financier Lyle Berman, brought in to help rescue the project’s finances during its darkest construction stretch, controlled a full third of it, and Stupak himself had no remaining day-to-day operational role in the resort he’d spent a decade dreaming into existence.
It didn’t matter. Design flaws let visitors wander into the tower itself without ever having to pass through the casino floor below — a basic revenue problem for a Las Vegas property — and the Stratosphere’s location, in a rougher part of town away from the Strip’s main corridor, worked against it from the start. Less than a year after opening, the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Stupak blamed poor management. Whatever the cause, he resigned as chairman of the board around the same time, and corporate raider Carl Icahn soon bought enough shares to take control of the company outright. Stupak made an effort to regain control and abandoned it. The tower he’d chased since a trip to see the Sydney skyline was, within a year of finally opening, no longer really his.
What’s There Now
Icahn ran the property through American Casino & Entertainment Properties for years before selling it to a Goldman Sachs real estate affiliate in 2007. Golden Entertainment eventually bought it in 2017 for $850 million and renamed it The Strat in 2019. It still stands today at 1,149 feet, still the tallest observation tower in the United States, still visible from nearly anywhere in the valley — a landmark almost nobody in Las Vegas can look at without at least half-remembering the story of the man who built it, nearly died getting there, and lost it within a year of finally standing at the top.