This Place in Crystal Bay Could Ruin a Billionaire's Day
Buy it now before HE does...and give it back to the public
Back in the early ‘00s, when I worked for the poorly managed and now-defunct North Lake Tahoe Bonanza newspaper, Incline Village, the town that defined its coverage area, was in a bit of a dead-ball era.
The founders were a pair of good ol' boy Oklahoma developers who famously bought the would-be tax haven for the ultra-wealthy from lumber scion and known racist, sexist, and all-around failson George Whittell Jr. Whittell set the blueprint with a biography that famously starts with the phrase: “He was born in 1881 to one of San Francisco’s wealthiest families. He never worked a day in his life.” And yet, there’s still a high school named after him.
Toward the end of his charmed existence, Whittell sold the 40,000-acre Incline parcel and the pair of Okies who bought it had big plans: Palm Springs on the North Shore or the Vegas Strip by the Big Blue.
Original renderings for Incline featured up to eleven mega-hotel/casino properties on Lakeshore Boulevard, a three-mile swath of northwest Lake Tahoe coastline that cuts through from just a mile from the California-Nevada state line to the lake’s more secluded East Shore.
But the plans never came to fruition, and the sale of parcels stagnated throughout the '60s—the Incline old-timers loved to talk about how they couldn’t give away half-acre Lakeshore lots for ten grand.
Enter the bi-state Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, activated in 1969, ostensibly halting all mega-growth in the Tahoe Basin based on the massively bad planning of projects of that era (starting with the eco-disaster that is the Tahoe Keys in South Shore.) Incline as a gamblers’/boaters’/golfers’/grifters’ paradise would have to wait a few decades.
One big project did manage to get built. The Sierra Tahoe Hotel (now the Hyatt) opened in 1964. It was most famously bought and reinvented in the late-1960s by Baltimore-based insurance executive and organized crime affiliate Nathan Jacobson.
Jacobson, forced by the SEC to sell his stake in Las Vegas’Caesars Palace in 1969, took his chips to Northern Nevada instead. In 1969, he purchased the Sierra Tahoe hotel-casino and invested $20 million into the property, renovating it into a Camelot-themed hotel and casino, calling it the Kings Castle Hotel and Casino. It opened in July 1970.
At the time, The Chicago Tribune wrote of the new venture: “The new Kings Castle has to be seen to be believed, and even then you’ll have problems. It’s an 11-story neo-Tudor structure crowned by a battlemented parapet from which medieval pennants wave in the mountain breezes....[Jacobson] predicted that it would become a hotel and entertainment complex to rival Las Vegas, a forecast that very well might please the boomsters but will drive conservationists even closer to suicide.”
The hotel opened with Buddy Hackett in the main 800-seat Camelot Room and Bobby Stevens and the new Checkmates with the revue “Flash” in the 300-seat Jesters Court lounge. In its first year alone, the hotel booked Line Renaud, Ike & Tina Turner, Sam & Dave, B.B. King, Don Adams, Don Rickles, Tony Bennett, Shecky Greene, and Pearl Bailey.
The resort brought in big business ($85m in revenue the first year) but did not make up the hole that Jacobson had dug. By the middle of 1971, the property was sold to local investors and eventually over to the Hyatt corporation in 1975. It was then the Alice in Wonderland battle with the Queen of Hearts-themed showrooms, uniforms, and architectural touches were traded in for a more sedate mountain lodge-casino feel. First, with cocaine-infused black and red decor in the eighties, all the way to the marble countertops and winks to unspecified Native American tropes embedded in the carpet patterns and Wild Wolf slot machines in the high-stakes loft that occupy the space today.
Late last week, Oracle co-Founder Larry Ellison purchased the Hyatt Regency Lake Tahoe Resort, Spa, and Casino. Incline Hotel LLC, a branch of Lawrence Investments (Waystar), bought the lakeside resort for $345 million, according to the Washoe County Recorder’s Office.
This is Ellison’s second significant hotel purchase on the Nevada side of the North Shore in three years. In 2018, the tech elder statesman, also through Lawrence Investments (Royco), acquired the Cal Neva Resort & Casino in nearby Crystal Bay for $35.8 million.
The Cal Neva was said to have been bought so Ellison could complete his four-acre compound up the road two miles on Lakeshore. The TRPA has a draconian development rule that favors the ultra-wealthy whereas coverage, or buildable area, can be transferred from one property to another.
And while Ellison and his family have their end-times lair all laid out—and then some—the Hyatt move signals something broader in scope.
In 2012, Ellison purchased 98% of the island of Lanai (roughly 87,000 acres) eight miles off the coast of Maui for a reported $300 million.
Since then, Ellison has buzzword-fed the press, declaring the island will be wholly sustainable—a completely “green” retreat for the mega-wealthy—by the end of this decade. In 2018, he launched a company unironically called Sensei to fulfill this mission.
The agricultural side of the business runs six hydroponic greenhouses spanning 120,000 square feet powered by Tesla solar panels and constantly checking data on their crops.
Sensei also spun up a $1,300/night spa, which also deploys data to track meals, sleeping, and all activity. Ellison’s plans include purchasing the island’s power plant and electric grid from Hawaiian Electric Co. to take it to 100 percent renewable fuels. Work on a desalination plant that would turn ocean water into fresh, drinkable water is currently mired in red tape.
All told, Ellison has thus far invested well over a half-billion dollars spinning up this “sustainable” playground for the ultra-wealthy on the former Dole pineapple plantation island.
It stands to reason now that he owns the two most significant resort pieces on the relatively sequestered and most sought-after stretch of North Lake Tahoe coastline that he’ll go ahead and implement similar practices to exclusify Incline in the name of catch-phrase eco-consciousness.
Incline, which already has its own ungated/gated community aspect complete with private beaches, two private golf courses, its own ski resort, and rec center and—most importantly—its own sewer and a fresh water source taken directly from the lake, seems like easy pickings for the endeavor.
The unincorporated town has already boomed over the course of the pandemic as wealthy ex-pats from the Bay Area and East Coast metros flocked to its shores—perhaps finally realizing the dream of founders Harold Tiller and Art Wood—to be an enclave of opportunity and opulence for those who could afford it most.
What neither founder could see, however, is that it now basically boils down to a single family and its surrogates in a gold rush for end-times resources.
61 Somers Loop Crystal Bay, NV 89402
One of the stories that was too oft-told by the OG Incline residents around the Tuesday morning coffee cake meetings in the newspaper conference room was about how a few of them got drunk one night and hitched up the bank—then a single-wide trailer parked in the lot that would house the post office and Village Market (RIP)—and towed it to an empty lot on the other side of town, hiding it behind the snow berm.
They had big laughs camping out the next morning and watching the manager pull up to see that his ...bank was missing.
The friendly sheriff (a buddy of theirs) searched for it, and eventually, the trailer was located behind the snow, in a shallow grave of some pine branches. The bank was moved back to its original spot by the mid-afternoon.
Case closed. No arrests were made.
I think of the Incline luminaries, the Michael Milkens, the Steve Wynns, the Warren Buffets, and yes, even Larry Ellison, who have at one point or another quietly called Lakeshore home. They, along with celebs-you-see-at-the-deli-counter like Aaron Rodgers, or Trent Dilfer, or Brent Jones, and the occasional misogynist tax cheat like Joe Francis, make up the town's lore.
It's always been a slightly off-kilter rich person hangout with the rest of us stopping by to gawk for a weekend or a year or ten. A weird place, with weird spaces—giant, tasteless mountain homes mostly empty year-round yet filled with stale, industrial cleaner air and a pool table that never gets used—all built over sacred lands.
These adornments are always in direct juxtaposition to the best tap water you’ve ever tasted and the fill-my-lungs-up-more mountain air. There’s a river of sludge or oppression running just underneath the town’s arterial roads, one leading to Reno, the other back to California, but we don’t talk about that in the brochure.
I guess when I read about Ellison and his not-so-thinly-veiled play to buy up that whole side of the mountain town Monopoly board to permanently indenture a servant class and fortress off his wealthy friends with their new resource-rich and endless woodsy playground, I think about the urgency in the preservation of whatever space is left for the rest of us.
…Then this place in Crystal Bay came up.
It’s five acres on the roughest, most unbuildable granite-shelved shores of the North Side of the lake, just on the other side of Ellison’s Cal-Neva property line.
There’s a modest beach and a boat ramp and trees and rocks and not much else.
In summers, I would swim from Kings Beach’s Speedboat Beach around where this spit of the rarest of land juts out. Looking straight down, you see all of the lakes +/- 100 feet of clarity just beyond your fingertips. It’s a view, straight into the abyss, forever into blue, unlike any I've seen or imagined since.
The fact that this parcel isn’t already a small federal or state park—or given back to the Washoe Tribe to manage—is a feature (not a flaw) of our broken system.
So buy it if you can and send it post-haste back to the people. Make this forgotten bay accessible to actual folks so at least one more generation can see what Ellison and his cohort take for granted every day—so they can dream what they dream.