Despite its small and ultratacky checkered exterior, which dragons or not looks more like a makeshift partition in a used-car dealership than the facade of a major casino, the Imperial Palace is among Las Vegas's largest hotels. Stretching away from its slender frontage on the Strip, it manages to cram in 2700 guestrooms.
Every square inch of the twelve-acre site has been pressed into use. During the 1980s, feeling squeezed between the newly expanded Flamingo to the south and the now-defunct Dunes to the north, it even reasserted its presence by building over its driveway. That's why, if you stroll off the Strip into what you expect to be the casino, you quickly find yourself either outdoors again, crossing the hotel approach road, or dropping beneath it on an elaborate escalator system.
The emphasis at the Imperial remains squarely on gambling. As well as its splendidly old-fashioned Race and Sports Book , rising in tiers above a central pit and reached by further escalators straight off the Strip, it also hosts a frenzied daily slot tournament, "Wild Times." Several gaming tables are labeled in Chinese, in deference to its many Asian customers.
Imperial owner Ralph Engelstad's two great passions are revealed in his Auto Collection , on the fifth floor of the parking garage at the rear (daily 9.30am-9.30pm; $7, or free with coupon from casino). One, obviously enough, is for cars; he owns more than seven hundred vehicles, of which around half are exhibited at any one time. The other seems to be for dictators and despots; in among a Rolls Royce made for the Tsar in 1914, and a Packard that belonged to Juan Peron, stands Adolf Hitler's personal armor-plated Mercedes Benz. Engelstad was fined $1.5 million by the Nevada Gaming Control Board in the 1980s for holding a party to celebrate Hitler's birthday, and was also banned from displaying Nazi memorabilia. Less contentious charabancs include Elvis's blue Cadillac and Liberace's cream Zimmer, with onboard candelabra.
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