Primm Nevada Entire Town Closing: Three Casinos Shut Down Forever

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:00]On a Wednesday in mid-May, a Las Vegas Review-Journal photographer drove past Buffalo Bill's. The barricades were already up around the parking lot. On one of those roadblocks, fastened with care, was a banner that read, "The party is at Primm Valley." It's a strange thing to advertise when, by July 4th, the party at Primm Valley is over, too.

[00:00:20]All three hotel casinos in Primm, Nevada, are about to close permanently.

[00:00:25]The gas stations are closing, too. The Lotto store is closing. Even the apartments where the staff lives are closing. 344 people are about to lose their jobs. And after almost 50 years on the California state line, the entire roadside stop that gave the town its name is shutting down. Here's what's going dark.

[00:00:46]On May 5th, the operator Affinity Gaming sent state regulators a letter announcing the permanent closure of Whiskey Pete's, Buffalo Bill's, and Primm Valley Resort. Two of those three were already shuttered. Whiskey Pete's closed in December of 2024. Buffalo Bill's stopped 24-hour operations in July of 2025, opening only occasionally for concerts at the Star of the Desert Arena. Primm Valley Resort is the last one standing, and the operator says it'll be dark by July 4th. But it's not just the casinos. The Primm Center gas station, the Flying J Trucker fueling stop, the workforce apartment complex called Desert Oasis, and the Lotto store just over the California border are all closing on the same day. The Desert Oasis tenants, mostly Affinity employees, got eviction notices the same day the layoff letters went out. They have until July 6th to be gone. The company spokeswoman, Melissa Crandall, called Primm a significant cash drain and management distraction for many years. Affinity says it tried to sell the operation and found no buyers. Clark County says it's working on a plan to keep the gas stations open for travelers after the rest of Primm goes dark. To understand how a place this big collapses, you have to know how it got built in the first place.

[00:02:07]In the early 1930s, a Scottish-born miner named Pete McIntyre died at a sanitarium. He'd spent the back end of prohibition running a gas station and selling bootleg whiskey on the California-Nevada border. The locals called him Whiskey Pete. According to legend, he asked to be buried standing up holding a bottle of his own bootleg facing the highway so he could keep an eye on travelers passing through.

[00:02:32]The land changed hands a few times until 1977, when a developer named Ernest Primm bought it and opened the first casino on the state line. He named it Whiskey Pete's after the man buried somewhere on the property.

[00:02:46]Ernest Primm died in 1981 and his son Gary took over the family business. Gary kept building. He added the Primadonna Resort, later renamed Primm Valley Resort. He partnered with Kirk Kerkorian to develop New York-New York on the strip.

[00:03:02]And in 1994, he opened Buffalo Bill's with a 6,500 seat concert arena called the Star of the Desert and a steel roller coaster called the Desperado. At 209 ft tall and 80 mph, the Guinness Book listed the Desperado as the world's tallest in 1996.

[00:03:24]There was a log flume called Adventure Canyon, a drop tower, a movie theater, an arcade.

[00:03:30]Primm wasn't just a roadside stop. It was a family destination.

[00:03:36]For a few years in the 1990s, Primm worked.

[00:03:39]People stopped on the drive between Los Angeles and Las Vegas because Primm was the first chance to gamble on the way in and the last chance on the way out.

[00:03:49]The same year Buffalo Bill's opened, construction crews grading land between the casinos accidentally unearthed an old plywood coffin.

[00:03:58]Inside was Whiskey Pete himself.

[00:04:02]They built him a new box and reburied him roughly where they found him. Then the deals got serious. In 1999, MGM Mirage paid about $244 million plus assumed debt to buy the entire Prim operation plus full ownership of New York New York on the strip. MGM's own SEC filing called Prim a major destination location. In the fall of 2006, MGM flipped the three Prim casinos to Herbst Gaming for $400 million. At that point, the combined property had 2,644 rooms and 136,000 square feet of gaming space. The ribbon cutting for the handover happened at Buffalo Bill's in April of 2007. Herbst Gaming's strategy was specific. They wanted Southern California Latino customers. They added Spanish-speaking dealers. They ran charter buses up from California. They booked Latin music acts at the Star of the Desert Arena.

[00:05:06]For a year or two, it worked. Then the economy collapsed. Herbst Gaming filed for bankruptcy in 2009. The founding family lost control by 2011.

[00:05:17]The court-administered reorganization renamed the company Affinity Gaming, and Affinity has been the operator ever since. From the $400 peak to a robust sale process that yielded no potential buyers, that's the arc.

[00:05:33]The reason Prim collapsed is not complicated. Two things happened up the road and across the border. First, Las Vegas got bigger and more entertaining.

[00:05:44]The strip is no longer just casinos.

[00:05:46]It's shows, nightclubs, restaurants, sports stadiums, a sphere. There's no reason to spend money at a roadside casino 40 miles south when you can spend it 25 minutes further north and get every other amenity attached.

[00:06:01]Second, California tribal gaming exploded. Tribal casinos now sit throughout California. Several of them within an hour or two of where Primm's old customer base lives. They're newer, the parking is closer, the concerts are bigger, and nobody has to cross a state line to get there. Then came COVID.

[00:06:22]Primm shut down with the rest of the world in 2020 and never really recovered. A hospitality professor at UNLV told the Los Angeles Times the pandemic just accelerated a decline that was already underway.

[00:06:36]In 2024, Affinity told Clark County the weekday traffic at the state line just wasn't there to support three full-time casino properties.

[00:06:46]They temporarily closed Whiskey Pete's.

[00:06:49]Then they temporarily closed Buffalo Bill's.

[00:06:53]By the time the operator quietly admitted both closures were permanent, it was May of 2026.

[00:07:00]A Las Vegas land broker named Rick Hildreth put it more bluntly. He said, "Obviously it must be because nobody is going there."

[00:07:09]The closures don't end at the casinos.

[00:07:12]The sprawling outlet mall attached to Primm Valley Resort, now called Primm Outlets, and once one of the top 10 outlet centers in the country by sales, is down to a single store as of this month.

[00:07:24]At its peak in 2001, the mall was in the top five nationally by sales per square foot.

[00:07:31]It went through two foreclosures and sold for a fraction of what it had once been worth.

[00:07:37]The Tom Fazio designed Primm Valley Golf Club, two 18-hole courses, permanently shut in July of 2024. The Desperado roller coaster has been standing but not running since February of 2020. The Adventure Canyon log flume and the rest of Buffalo Bill's family attractions went dark in 2020 and never reopened.

[00:08:00]The Ivanpah solar towers you can see just past Primm on the California side were supposed to start shutting down in 2026, but the California Public Utilities Commission unanimously rejected that closure agreement in December of 2025.

[00:08:16]So, for now they stay.

[00:08:19]The one piece of Primm history that's still inside Primm Valley Resort until July 4th is the bullet-riddled 1934 Ford V8 that Bonnie and Clyde were killed in.

[00:08:30]After that, nobody has publicly said what happens to it.

[00:08:35]Real estate sources told the Review-Journal the most likely future for Primm is an industrial park, distribution warehouses for trucks coming up from the Los Angeles ports. An industrial property specialist named Amy Ogden pointed out the catch. Warehouses still need workers, and with no housing nearby, the math doesn't work. Other ideas in the air include solar fields or even affordable residential development for buyers willing to commute. A casino developer named Joe DeSimone, who owns properties in Southern Nevada, thinks Primm could still support one or two reinvented casinos.

[00:09:15]But that would take, in his words, a very large investment. The Primm family, who still owns the land, isn't giving up. Corey Clemetson, grandson of the original Ernest Primm, published an open letter in the Review-Journal saying the family is working toward a revitalized Primm and a return to better days.

[00:09:36]A casino historian named David Schwartz, asked whether Primm could ever come back, said he would never say never. For now, here's what travelers actually need to know. If you've been driving between Las Vegas and Southern California and counting on Primm as a stop for cheap fuel, a quick slot pull, or a Powerball ticket on the California side, your window closes on July 4th, 2026.

[00:10:01]After that, the next gas and convenience stop south of the state line is the Terrible's Chevron on Yates Well Road, about 7 mi further down I-15. If you want to see what a real Nevada ghost town looks like, the actual town of Goodsprings is about a 20-minute detour off the highway on the way back to Vegas.

[00:10:22]The bigger story is what Primm represents.

[00:10:25]It was built for a generation of travelers who wanted the first or last chance to gamble at the border.

[00:10:32]That model worked for about 30 years.

[00:10:35]Then, destination Vegas and California tribal casinos outflanked it from both sides, and a pandemic made sure the gap never closed. There's still land, still infrastructure, still a family that wants the place revived, but the roadside gambling era at the state line is ending on July 4th.

[00:10:56]Thanks for watching. Don't forget to like and subscribe, and see you in the next one.