Daily News from New York, New York • 212

m.Kw Wl 7 Surafey, May. 7 798 V. Sports and sightseeing vie with casinos for Nevada vacationers' attention By BRUCE CHADW1CK --wy I 1 fit A vtssl plexes in Vegas and visitors are advised to play early morning or at night because of the heat. Lakes: The big attraction is strikingly beautiful Lake Mead, north of Hoover Dam, one of the world's largest lakes (400 miles of shoreline). The lake, 35 miles southeast of Vegas, is a good place for swimming, boating and fishing.

It has become a popular side trip for Vegas visitors. The view of the desert and the mountains from the cool waters of the lake is hauntingly beautiful. And, of course, you can get to Las Vegas in less than 30 minutes. Swimming: Almost all the hotels have one or more enormous swimming pools. The Golden Nugget organization's new Mirage, next to Caesars, will have 11.

Water Parks: The Wet 'N Wild Wa-terpark, right on the Strip near Circus Circus, is a big local hit, attracting over 400,000 people a year. It's loaded with slides, streams, tidal wave pools and chutes. Great for the kids. Everything at Las Vegas continues to be cheap, too. First class hotel rooms go at about $50 per night, often less (you can get modern, clean and attractive rooms for as little as $33 a night on some package deals).

The famous buffet meals, 99-cent breakfasts, $1.99 lunches and $4.99 dinners, are still there and still popular (expect lines, though). The biggest names in show business still appear nightly, the showgirls ere still gorgeous and the all-night casinos still packed. Everytingyou always did in Vegas is still there, but now you can bring your golf clubs, tennis racket and swimming trunks, too. More than ever, Las Vegas is a full-fledged resort destination, a place to gambol as well as Daily News Staff Wnter Las Vegas, Dlev. For decades, Las Vegas made every effort to keep its visitors indoorswhere they could gamble.

From the late 1940s through the '70s, the hotels did all they could to keep people out of the hot sun and inside the cool casino. The emphasis on leisure and entertainment was all indoors, from lounge acts to showroom production shows to gourmet restaurants to casinos, and casinos, and more casinos. The big fear was that if people went outside to do anything, they'd never come back to the tables. Now Las Vegas is brazenly promoting itself not as a casino mecca, but as an outdoor vacation mecca hyping its golf courses, baseball teams, tennis complexes, lakes, valleys, Old West towns and even water slide parks for kids. What's going on here? The emphasis on outdoor activities is so pronounced, in fact, that hotels now even urge prospective gamblers to leave town entirely and drive 35 miles to gorgeous Lake Mead where they can swim, go boating and fishing and take tours of Hoover Dam.

The new emphasis on outdoor vacations in Las Vegas, which is blessed with good weather year round, seems to be working for the casino city, though. Since 1985, the number of visitors has increased a steady 10-12 each year. "What we want to do is develop into a vacation destination that can rival Mexico or Florida or the Caribbean. We want to get people to come here for a week in nice warm weather and play lots of golf and tennis and enjoy themselves," said Frank Sain, director of the Las Vegas Convention Center. "They're going to gamble anyway.

ANIMATED DINOSAURS awe youngsters at new Las Vegas Museum of Natural History. is one of the loveliest minor league stadiums in America (Cap. Tickets are just $4.50 and $3.50, and kids can get lots of autographs before the game. Golf: Las Vegas now has 18 championship golf courses (the larger hotels all have membership privileges at different clubs and there are many public courses) and is home to the Panasonic PGA Golf Championship each year. Tennis: There are 11 tennis com we know that.

Our statistics show that 94 of all visitors gamble and the average gambler spends $700 here. If we can show people they can have a full vacation, too, it makes us just that more attractive," he added. No matter what you want to do outdoors, Las Vegas seems to have it Baseball: Vegas is home to the Las Vegas Stars, a Triple A minor league team that plays its home games in five-year-old Cashman Field, right off the Strip, which baseball experts say Las fcgas 5s on A 4, LAS VEGAS FROM PAGE 1 7w "i- T-aJ it'-. to il. 7 aft IM i Mfli if Til I 1 1 1 I MORE THAN 3 DOZEN hotels and casinos line both sides of the 3V2-mile Las Vegas Stnp.

era guest buildings are still in use at the Flamingo, however, including one that contained his private apartment (a mini-fortress complete with foot-thick walls and two always-guarded stairways in case a speedy retreat was called for). Siegel's opulent furnishings are intact, and the one-bedroom suite is available for rent at about $400 a night Also under construction on the Hilton property is a separate two-story "theme casino" called Shea's. Everything about it will be Irish, from the decor to the help, according to the Hilton' people. It opens this fall. Just up Las Vegas the Strip's main drag, Steve Wynn, operator of the Golden Nugget Hotel and Casino in downtown Las Vegas, is putting up the 32-story, Mirage Hotel, representing an investment of more than $550 million.

Now that's mucho money, even by Las Vegas standards. When ready for use next spring the addition will also contain a moderately priced Italian restaurant (for a total of seven on-property dining places), an airport-style reception area for up to 600 arriving guests, and space for 300 more slot machines. fhe Hilton management had to dismantle one of the original Flamingo Hotel buildings and tear up slain mobster Ben (Bugsy) Siegel's beloved rose garden to make way for the new wing, but that's the way it goes in the Nevada capital of glitz and glitter. I'm sure that Bugsy, who opened the Flamingo Hotel in 1946 and was killed by a shotgun blast just six months later (in Beverly Hills, not Las Vegas) would have understood. A couple of low-rise Siegel- are stored in huge dirt-filled wooden buckets while awaiting eventual transplanting around the Y-shaped main building.

Plans call for the Mirage to open late this year. Pt will be joined shortly by II several other behemoths, including the Circus Circus organization's Excalibur, which will resemble a European castle; the 21-story, 430-suite Rio Vegas, the town's first all-suite re Sidewalk superintendents can watch as a man made mountain is being put together on the site (since not very much about Las Vegas is real anyway, it comes as no surprise to learn that the "mountain" is made of relatively lightweight pieces, each one numbered and assembled like a giant jigsaw puzzle). What is real is a literal forest of tall palms and other trees aligned in neat rows at one end of the property. Most sort property; a 720-room addition to the Landmark Hotel, and a 25-story addition with 400 rooms at the Lady Luck in the downtown area. In addition, the Radisson Group has plans to develop a property dubbed the Carnivaal; Caesars Palace has launched the first phase of an on-site shopping center, and the Riviera Hotel intends to break ground later this year for a 43-story tower See LAS VEGAS Page 12.