Near Tropicana Avenue and Pecos Road, five miles southeast of the Las Vegas Strip, stands a house built in the 1970s by a porn star to resemble a giant phallus — perhaps even his own giant phallus. It’s a great story … that’s totally false. But the truth about the “Penis on Pecos” is equally great…
Erection Day
The house was built in 1975 by Las Vegas couple Earl and Gloria Alger. They bought the lot, just two blocks from their old home, from a woman named Eileen Largo in 1973.
Earl wasn’t in adult films. He was wiring the Strip’s casinos and running his own electrical business.
When they asked an architect friend to design a unique custom home, the Algers had no idea how unique it would turn out to be.
Apparently, this architect wasn’t that good of a friend (Earl remembered him only as “Martinez”) because it seems he pulled a grade-school prank on the Algers.
“He came up with the design and said, ‘Don’t make a decision until you see the drawings, because of the round ends,’” Earl recalled in a 2010 Las Vegas Sun interview.
Earl said thought he thought the request was strange, but didn’t see anything X-rated in the blueprints.
At first, neither did anyone else.
“No, it never came to mind,” Earl recalled. “I just thought it was a unique design.”
About 10 years later, however, a pilot who regularly flew over the neighborhood broke the news to Earl.
“I’ll speak frankly with you — the long end looks like a penis, with two balls at the end of it,” Earl remembered being informed.
Technically, it doesn’t look exactly like a penis and balls from overhead. It’s more like a penis and balls as painted by Picasso, since it’s missing the head. And from the ground, it just looks like another quirky, modernist house.
But once the nickname stuck, it never let go.
Life Imitates Legend
The Algers sold the “Penis on Pecos” in 1993. But that’s far from where its story ends. In fact, it’s where it gets great…
After operating from around 2003-2010 as the Djanel Spa & Salon, in 2016 it became the Studios, an educational resource center for the LGBTQ+ community that lost its county business license four years later for renting out space to an unlicensed operation called the Las Vegas Sex Dolls Experience.
And then the “Penis on Pecos” gave in entirely to its own urban legend.
Since 2022, it has been operating as a legal sex club for swingers.
“Did you know our house is shaped like a giant p*nis?” asks the Instagram page for Club 5150 Pecos.
If you build it, they will come.
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