The Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas has been an icon for tourists traveling to the Strip. The property opened the day after Christmas in 1946, despite the fact that it wasn’t yet complete. Mobster Bugsy Siegel and his partners opened the hotel with just 105 rooms, hoping the grand event would attract business that would recoup cost overruns and help finance the rest of construction.

The Flamingo was to be a new kind of luxury for Vegas, a full resort that featured a nine-hole golf course; tennis, squash and handball courts; a trapshooting range and extensive landscaping. Its high-end clientele would be served by staff wearing tuxedos.

The opening was generally considered a disaster, however, after a storm grounded VIPs from Hollywood in California and gamblers who didn’t have rooms at the unfinished hotel took their winnings and left. Locals tended to prefer the cheaper casinos in downtown Las Vegas to those on the Strip.

The Flamingo Hotel quickly shut down, reopening on March 1 the next year. While it became more successful, the mobsters who had poured money into Siegel’s project were not happy about its budget problems and suspected that Siegel was skimming money. Siegel was killed in the Beverly Hills home of his girlfriend in June.

The mobsters quickly took control of the hotel, renaming it The Fabulous Flamingo, and it turned a $4 million profit in its first full year in 1948. Today, the hotel is known as the Flamingo Las Vegas. It’s owned by Caesars Entertainment Corporation.

It is the oldest hotel on the Strip still in operation, with 3,626 hotel rooms, a Margaritaville mini-casino and a garden courtyard habitat that houses flamingos. This story on the history of the Flamingo Hotel originally appeared on the Travel Yahoo website.