The luxury casino is German before it is Monégasque. Friedrich Weinbrenner’s Kurhaus opened at Baden-Baden in 1824 with a gaming room inside it, and became famous in the mid-1830s when France banned gambling and the players crossed the border. It is thirty-nine years older than the Casino de Monte-Carlo, which is the perfected version rather than the first. Dostoevsky’s The Gambler came out of a visit to Baden-Baden.
Monte-Carlo’s distinction is different and larger: opened on 1 June 1863 on an arid plateau to rescue a state’s finances, it is the only house in this Library that funded a country, and Société des Bains de Mer has held it for a hundred and sixty-two years.
The chapter also records what a prohibition does. On 30 April 1946 Decree-Law 9,215 banned gambling throughout Brazil and some seventy casinos closed at once, most of them inside luxury hotels. The Copacabana Palace still trades; its casino has been shut for eighty years — the first entry in the Library that is a closed house inside a living one.
| Code | House | Contribution | Record |
|---|---|---|---|
| LHL-S-179 | Kurhaus Baden-Baden | LHL-S-105Casino de Monte-Carlo | Verified |
| LHL-S-180 | Casino Carrasco | Montevideo, opened 4 February 1921 — projected from 1912 by Alfredo Arocena through a company formed to build a hotel in the seaside resort of Carrasco; architects Jacques Dunant and Gaston Mallet with Felipe Elena, eclectic historicist with neoclassical and baroque. Einstein and García Lorca among its guests. National historic monument 1975, closed through the 1990s as the building decayed, reopened 2013 as the Sofitel Montevideo Casino Carrasco & Spa. The casino is in the basement | Verified |
| LHL-S-181 | Copacabana Palace Casino | LHL-H-193The Oberoi Grand Kolkata | Closed record |
| LHL-S-182 | Cassino da Urca | Rio de Janeiro — the Copacabana Palace’s rival and the room where Carmen Miranda was made a star in the 1930s and 40s. Closed by the same 1946 decree and now a college ⚑ founding date and ownership require two sources | Review |