This magazine, Casino Style, and its predecessor, Casino Design, celebrate the design, construction and renovation of new or existing casinos, and the ones featured in this year’s annual edition certainly are no exception to that rule.

But often you have to demolish to begin again, and that’s what has happened up and down the Las Vegas Strip and in other areas of the country. It seems that some casinos have a “use by” date and no matter how much renovation you put into an existing casino, it’s not enough and it must come down.

Funny thing, however. After almost every demolition, one thing remains and one thing only—the parking garage!

We’ve long heard and reported in the pages of this magazine about the advantages of choosing to build a parking garage versus almost any other expansion project—the chief one being that the return on investment is by far the best. The worst? A golf course, according to all the experts.

But now we see that parking garages are survivors. Let’s look at Atlantic City, where parking garages are really a necessity since there are few places for patrons to park on that small island.

It all started with Harrah’s, which built a modern parking garage when it opened in the early 1980s featuring free parking—all other casinos in town charged at least $5.

Then in the rush to build parking garages, there were some mishaps. The Claridge casino went for years without a parking garage but finally managed to build a very nice one. The first day it was open, a woman drove through the retaining cables on a high floor and killed herself and her passenger. A few years later, the rush to build a parking garage at the Tropicana saw several floors collapse using a new concrete composite, killing four workers.

So it’s probably a little surprising that when the Sands was imploded in 2007 for a new, never-built casino, the parking garage was left intact, and sits like a sentinel over the property to this day. Same thing happened when Trump Plaza was destroyed last year. The parking garage remains.

Earlier this year in Las Vegas, Station Casinos decided that it would not reopen four casinos that closed during the pandemic, and to make sure of the deed restriction barring any other casinos to be built there after the land was sold, the properties came down. The three that had parking garages, Fiesta Henderson, Fiesta Rancho and Texas Station? You guessed it. The casinos are no more but parking garages remain untouched.

It turns out that parking garages are a mix of art and science, but no matter how they are built, they endure. The image of parking garages as dark tombs where you scurry to the elevators to avoid predators has pretty much been dissipated. The new Circa, which opened last year in Downtown Las Vegas, made parking a centerpiece of its marketing campaign. The “Garage Mahal” at Circa features bright lights, colorful murals and crystal clear signage. Any casino parking garage now has to have a façade that blends into the property.

The science part comes in with the durability of the materials used. Parking garages have to “breathe,” and you sometimes can feel that motion as you drive up and down the access ramps.

And designing that access is scientific as well. Whether you can enter a tight winding ramp to exit or the architects can have you blissfully following signs to the exit without worrying about losing control of your vehicle is clearly a mind game, as well as an efficient exit plan.

In Las Vegas, where most casinos now charge for parking, a new element has been added to the equation. Little lights hovering over each space glow either red (occupied) or green (open) so drivers can distinguish the ability to find a space. Unfortunately, there has been something of a backlash—at least among locals—who bristle paying for something that was free for so long.

So those long-overlooked parking garage architects and designers have something to be proud of. They have outlasted the casinos they were built to serve, emphasizing the importance of efficient and effective design and operation of what might be the most important part of your casino complex.