Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack made history on the ground under your feet. The Sands Hotel opened in 1952 and quickly became the most fashionable address on the Las Vegas Strip, attracting Hollywood royalty, East Coast mob bosses, and anyone else who wanted to be at the center of American cultural life in the 1950s and early 1960s. Frank Sinatra took a two percent ownership stake in exchange for performing regularly, and where Sinatra went, his friends followed.
In January 1960, while filming Ocean's 11 nearby, Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford, and Joey Bishop performed nightly at the Copa Room showroom. They called themselves the Clan; the press called them the Rat Pack. They came onstage with cocktails, improvised their sets, made each other laugh, and created a vision of masculine American sophistication that has never quite been replicated. They also performed a milestone moment in civil rights history — Sammy Davis Jr. was one of the first Black performers to stay in the same hotel where he appeared, at Sinatra's insistence.
When Howard Hughes bought the Sands in 1967, the Rat Pack era effectively ended. Sinatra quarreled with management, physically assaulted a casino executive, and moved his operation to Caesars Palace. The Sands was imploded on November 26, 1996, to make way for the Venetian. The crowd that gathered to watch cheered as it fell.