The Drink and Eat Too flower sign lit in neon at dusk on Harmon Avenue in Las Vegas

Seventy-Five East Harmon: When Vegas Nightlife Belonged to Locals

October 8, 2026Brad Goldberg

The address is a timeshare now.

Marriott's Grand Chateau, 75 East Harmon Avenue. Stand out front and face the Strip, and you are standing roughly where a generation of Las Vegas Locals spent their twenties.

Paul Anka built it first.

1978. He called it Jubilation and he did not undersell it. Three million dollars. Ten thousand square feet. Dinner and a dance floor under one roof, and a press claim that it was the largest disco in the world. A man from Ottawa who already knew the showrooms, deciding what Las Vegas glamour ought to look like, and for a few years he was right.

Paul Anka with Elvis Presley and sound engineer Bill Porter at the Las Vegas Hilton in August 1972

Paul Anka, right, with Elvis Presley and sound engineer Bill Porter at the Las Vegas Hilton, August 1972, six years before Jubilation. Capitol Records press photo.

Jubilation was gone before the eighties were out. Discos die faster than the people who love them.

The same building came back as the Shark Club.

Everyone will tell you it was named for Jerry Tarkanian. The man who booked its acts says the owners came from Austin and the name was a coincidence. Nobody cared then and nobody should now.

For most of a decade the Shark Club was where you went if you were young here and had no interest in a lounge act. It had the first moving light rig in town, and it booked acts Las Vegas had not seen yet: Tone Loc, Ice-T, Great White, Slaughter. The Gin Blossoms played that room. So did No Doubt.

Same street, a block east, a second club.

Aerial map of Harmon Avenue in Las Vegas marking the Jubilation and Shark Club site at 75 East Harmon and the Drink and Eat Too site on the northeast corner of Harmon and Koval

Harmon Avenue today. Jubilation and the Shark Club stood on the land now under Marriott's Grand Chateau; Drink and Eat Too, later Ice, on the northeast corner of Harmon and Koval. Aerial: USGS.

Drink and Eat Too opened on the northeast corner of Harmon and Koval in 1995. Michael Morton and Scott DeGraff had been running the original in Chicago since 1992 and brought it west. Themed dance floors. And bubble night, which anyone who was there brings up first and explains last, because there is no dignified way to tell your kids that the dance floor disappeared under a sea of bubbles and it was the greatest thing that had ever happened to them.

The Shark Club closed in 1996. By then the casinos had done the math.

Here is the part that stings.

The men who built The Drink went on to build the thing that replaced it. Morton and DeGraff took nightlife inside the buildings, where the gaming floor could pay for it: N9NE, Rain, Ghostbar, Moon, the pools at the Palms. Friends since they were nine years old, which is where the name came from. They were very good at it. The machine that made a Vegas night cost two hundred dollars and require a list has its fingerprints on Harmon Avenue.

They got better offers, the way everybody here eventually does.

Neighbors fought The Drink over the noise, and by 2003 they had won. Ice took over the building that summer. When Ice closed, the corner sat empty for more than a decade.

What Harmon had, for about twenty-five years and three clubs, was a version of this city where the nightlife belonged to the people who lived in it. A car and a cover charge got you in. The guy at the door knew your friend's brother.

That is gone. It is not coming back, and pretending otherwise is how you end up buying a Vegas shirt at the airport.

Still. Some of us were there.