Old-school developer Kishner dies at 84
Taway off the north Strip, Somerset Shopping Center isn’t much these days. Its throwback neon sign stands along Convention Center Drive. But the plaza, developed in the 1960s by Irwin Kishner and his uncle, is mostly empty, and vacant stores are in disrepair.
“I cry when I go down that street,” Kishner’s daughter Sharon said Friday, not just because of the memories but because “it doesn’t represent” all of the effort her dad put in.
Irwin Kishner died Monday at age 84 after suffering complications from diabetes and kidney problems. He was buried Thursday at King David Cemetery.
A native New Yorker, Kishner wasn’t the biggest developer in town, and his cluster of properties between Las Vegas Boulevard and the Las Vegas Convention Center — the shopping plaza, apartment buildings on the Kishner Drive cul-de-sac and a vacant lot where he tore down a motel several years ago — are far from the flashiest.
But he had been in Las Vegas since the Mob and Rat Pack days and, as you can imagine, had some good stories.
I met Kishner in 2015, when I wrote a story about him for the Las Vegas Sun. He was funny and blunt, a great interview, although he initially wasn’t sure about doing it.
(When I called to see if he would meet with me, he asked me to send him a letter, on company letterhead, outlining what I wanted to talk about.)
Sitting in his upstairs office at Somerset Shopping Center, he told me he moved to Florida when he was 13 and that he went to college there. South Florida was mostly transplanted New
SEGALL
Drone launched in 2015.
The conference kicked off with a recorded video welcome message from Gov. Brian Sandoval, followed by a keynote from Federal Aviation Administration chief Michael Huerta, in which he mentioned that Nevada is a key player in research and development for a potential drone detection system.
The comments helped to raise awareness about the efforts in Nevada to shape the industry, Walach said.
He and a team also had four companies conduct live drone demonstrations during the pre-conferece day on Tuesday at the 6-acre Henderson Unmanned Vehicle Range urban drone-testing site, 1125 Nevada State Drive.
Tom Wilczek, aerospace and defense industry specialist for the Governor’s Office of Economic Development, said the demonstrations were a success.
“I would like to see the HUVR demonstration area grow and have more opportunities and more of these entities come out and demo their produts,” Wilczek said, adding that he and Walach are looking into ways to do that.
Contact Nicole Raz at nraz@ reviewjournal.com or 702-380-4512. Follow @Journalistnikki on Twitter.