The STRAT Hotel, Casino & Tower

This guide to The STRAT Hotel, Casino & Tower follows Bob Stupak, a Pittsburgh dice runner's son who arrived in Las Vegas at twenty-two and built a tiny casino with an outsized name before rebuilding it as the space-themed Vegas World. You'll hear how a trip to Sydney gave him the idea for a tower to rival the Eiffel Tower's role in Paris, and follow the 1991 groundbreaking through a fire that tore through the half-built structure and a funding scare that nearly ended the project. It closes with Stupak's motorcycle crash weeks before the tower topped out, three weeks before opening night.