The sign to the Tahoe Biltmore Lodge and Casino welcomed visitors to the Nevada side of North Lake Tahoe for generations. The legendary property is set for demolition on May 1.

The front door to the Tahoe Biltmore Lodge and Casino didn’t budge. I smashed my face up against it to get a better look inside and couldn’t make out much through the tinted glass. What I could see didn’t look promising. 

I tried the door next to it — frozen shut. 

It appeared I’d missed partaking in the final hours of the legendary North Lake Tahoe casino and hotel’s existence. Although the marquee above the main entry said it’d remain open till April 23 for a “last hurrah” (demolition is slated for May 1), maybe someone had mercifully ended its run 10 days in advance. 

As I was getting ready to give up and go, the door at my original entry point opened up. A woman wearing a backpack and a beanie stormed out. Ignoring me, she took two steps out onto the sidewalk, pockmarked from years of salt thrown out for winter safety, and lit a cigarette. 

“Is it open?” I asked, wondering whether she’d also come to pay homage to the iconic three-quarter-century-old institution, even in its disrepair.

She took a drag. “I wouldn’t say that,” she said as smoke flared out of her nostrils. I ducked in the door as it began to close behind me. 

Whoever she was, she was dead on the mark. 

Stepping into my beloved Bilty, as regulars call it, was more depressing than I’d prepared for prior to my simple farewell. It was an open casket for me and all those who stopped by for a final viewing, with reminders of what it once was everywhere. 

Cafe Biltmore — home to the mighty $1.99 breakfast and booths filled with late-night revelers seven or eight deep, with dishes of bacon, eggs, sausage and hash brown residue piled four high — was shuttered. 

Once home of the fabled $1.99 breakfast, Cafe Biltmore inside the Tahoe Biltmore Lodge and Casino is already shuttered. The building that housed the popular restaurant is set to be destroyed on May 1. 

The bar area was patron-free, with no bartender in sight. The sportsbook had gone dark. The blackjack, roulette and craps tables, gone — perhaps already in storage or a landfill. Who knows.

Even the janky cardboard cutout of a game-of-chance tribute to the Biltmore’s famed ghost, Mary — an old cabaret performer who was killed in a car wreck on Mount Rose Highway and came back to haunt the casino and hotel guests for decades — was leaning against a back wall, ignored by the errant passerby. 

The bar in the Nevada Ballroom of the Tahoe Biltmore Lodge and Casino in Crystal Bay, Nev., sits empty. The legendary property will be demolished on May 1. 

A security guard in a black button-down shirt with a Biltmore logo embroidered on the left breast sat silently on a stool in a corner of the space that was so dark only the light from his phone screen illuminated his face. Once in a while, he’d get up and do a lap, the jingle from his retractable key ring the only discernible sound of human life.  

Here and there, weary slot players would dutifully push the required buttons to keep it going, if for a few minutes longer. 

If there was any type of serotonin hit from the occasional celebratory clang and do-do-loop of a win, the pall cast over the place was certainly more than enough to kill the buzz. 

The Tahoe Biltmore opened its doors across the highway from the clifflike shores of Crystal Bay in 1946, with a mishmash of architectural styles that created one pleasingly alluring building. Depending on where you were standing, it was a post-war flat-front midcentury modern concrete facade etched with a woodsy theme, or it could be a Tudor with a giant white wrought iron Rapunzel balcony wrapping around two-thirds of its front. Or it was a giant sign that ill-advisedly resembled a tipi, the first landmark to greet California visitors and let them know for sure they’d arrived on the Nevada side of the North Shore of Lake Tahoe. 

The marquee on the Tahoe Biltmore Lodge and Casino announces its plans for its final party. An Orange County-based real estate developer bought the property last October and has plans to demolish the beloved building on May 1. 

Original owner and builder Joseph Blumenfeld wanted an alternative to the sprawling gambling and entertainment juggernaut Cal Neva (itself shuttered since 2013) across the way on the lake side of the highway. And that’s what he got. If the Neva was Frank Sinatra and steak and lobster, the Biltmore was Phyllis Diller and scrambled eggs. 

The Bilty was never the most glam place, never the go-to spot with the big-name celebs or known for luring in deep-pocketed guests with recently redone rooms. By design, it was a stopover that families could afford to visit to see a little bit of Lake Tahoe. Nobody ever got touched up too much at the tables, and everyone left pretty happy, or at least a little buzzed and definitely full — for not much money. 

By the time this century had rolled around, the Biltmore was falling behind the times in a way that took it from kitsch to full-on dive status.

My own memories of the Biltmore go back decades. As I made my way around the casino floor one final time, I remembered it as the place I’d come to when I lived in San Francisco and stretched the weekend evenings long into the first gray light coming over the lake. It was where, as a local, I sat across the blackjack table from my father, a serious card player, and he shooed me away by telling the pit boss I was too drunk to play. It was the go-to pre- and post-party spot for piling 20 into a hotel room for a Halloween Tainted Love show across the street at the Crystal Bay Club. It’s where all the dirtbags came out once a year with their feral mountain dogs and got absolutely blind drunk during a beer fest fundraiser for the local humane society. 

Nevada City resident Fred Anderson decided to play slots for a bit at the Tahoe Biltmore Lodge and Casino earlier this week one final time. The beloved 76-year-old property on the Nevada side of North Lake Tahoe is set for a date with the wrecking ball on May 1. 

I knew today’s Biltmore wasn’t going to be anything like the Bilty I’d known and loved. But this. This was — in the words of Nevada City resident Fred Anderson, there on that same afternoon for the same reason, to “come back one more time” — merely looking in on “another victim in the slow death of Tahoe.”

“I came here with my parents in the ’70s, back when this carpet was new,” he said. “And then, it was live. There were good acts here, a great buffet. The rooms weren’t special, but they were nice and clean. It was welcoming, just a great spot for working- and middle-class folks to come and have a night or stay at the lake for a couple days.”

In the spring of 2007, the future of the Biltmore was more hopeful. Its would-be savior, Incline Village-based Roger Wittenberg. Wittenberg had made his name as the inventor of Trex, a composite decking made from recycled materials, and was known in the area as a guy with deep pockets and a sharp business mind. 

A marquee thanking patrons of the Tahoe Biltmore Lodge and Casino for more than three-quarters of a century in business currently greets the fabled property's last visitors. 

Wittenberg had purchased the 15-acre parcel, which included the hotel-casino, for $28.4 million at the height of the market and immediately announced plans to turn the property into a hotel, wellness retreat and public space called Boulder Bay. “We are looking forward to working in tandem with all of the stakeholders and communities involved to develop an exciting master plan,” he said in June 2007.

The permitting phase of the project alone took four years to get the green light from the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, the lake’s bistate governing body.

In April 2011, at the height of the nation’s financial crisis, Boulder Bay’s grand plans won approval. The approved development involved a scaled-back eight-building complex, with a 300-room hotel, 59 condominiums and 14 affordable housing units, along with a 2.7-acre open space area.

But Wittenberg would never have a ceremonial golden shovel groundbreaking or a victory lap. Beset by financial problems following approval, and coinciding with the housing bubble bursting in the Basin, Boulder Bay officials said in 2012 that the bank that had lent them the money on the property had gone belly up. In stepped JMA Ventures, the same San Francisco-based real estate development company that had purchased Alpine Meadows ski area just outside nearby Tahoe City in 2007, brought on as a partner. 

“The timing just wasn’t right, economically,” said Boulder Bay President and Wittenberg’s daughter Heather Bacon in 2017 of the project’s stall. “And at the end of the day, that would have hurt the community.”

By 2014, Boulder Bay said it had funding to start a water runoff project, a first phase required by the TRPA to keep building permits active. But by early 2015, it reported its money had once again run out. 

The lobby area of the Tahoe Biltmore Lodge and Casino sits empty as the 76-year-old North Lake Tahoe hotel-casino readies for its final week in operation. 

This time, Boulder Bay officials said they were working with a private equity firm to secure additional funding. At the same time, they were scrambling to pay more than $500,000 in back taxes to Washoe County to narrowly avoid a public auction of the property. “We can still attract people,” Wittenberg said at the time. “We have to create an experience that is refreshing and unique enough that people don’t confuse it with anything else.”

Last October, Wittenberg and Bacon, on behalf of Boulder Bay LLC, sold the property to Newport Beach-based EKN Development Group for $56.8 million.

EKN officials have plans of their own, with CEO Ebbie Khan Nakhjavani saying their new project will “introduce an unparalleled hospitality experience that will accentuate Lake Tahoe’s natural scenery and beauty, while embracing the distinctive and pristine characteristics of the region.”

Locals who know anything of the recent history of the property are skeptical. One of them was Mike Tuhey, a self-described 50-year Tahoe native and current resident of Tahoma on the lake’s West Shore. Tuhey, clad in Carhartt overalls and work boots, was “paying his respects” the afternoon I was there, sitting at a slot machine and reminiscing about his time spent at the Bilty. 

Mary the ghost will haunt the hallways of the legendary Tahoe Biltmore Lodge and Casino no more. The Bilty's final day in business is Saturday, April 23, and the building is set for demolition the following week. 

“I’ve been coming here for a long time, and I just don’t know anymore,” he said, “I guess we’re used to things being taken by now.”

He said that since COVID-19, the sweeping changes in the Tahoe Basin have been particularly pronounced. None of them, he said, favor the locals.

“You don’t have to do much but look around to see how bad it is,” he said. “You can’t have only second, third and fourth homeowners mixed with people who are working remote. There’s no housing; there’s no opportunities. There’s nothing to afford.”

A carpenter, Tuhey said work was plentiful, but that’s not the problem. The problem is housing prices, gridlock, lack of public transportation and living wages that aren’t keeping up. Places like the Biltmore closing only “pour salt on that wound.”

“It’s hard as hell to live up here, to stay here,” Tuhey said. “They need to do something for people besides put more condos up. That’s not an answer.”

On my way out, I stepped behind a temporary partition and into the Nevada Ballroom, the place that once hosted Soupy Sales, Rowan and Martin, Regis Philbin and Rudy Vallee. All I spied were keeled-over old black velour lounge chairs bedecked in bronze studs and a couple of craps tables covered in tarps. 

As Californians made their way across the Nevada state line on Lake Tahoe's North Shore, they were immediately greeted by the signature sign of the Tahoe Biltmore Lodge and Casino. A "last hurrah" party for the property will take place Saturday, April 23. 

As for Mary the ghost, there was no sign of her either. I sat at the empty bar one last time, and it occurred to me that I might have run into her on the way in — the woman I spoke to at the entrance. With that knowledge, I got out of there as fast as I could. 

It’s never a good idea to stick around once the ghosts have left the building.