Miss America bound for Las Vegas

LAS VEGAS – After 84 years of crowning beauties on the Boardwalk, the Miss America pageant is moving to the Las Vegas Strip, organizers announced Wednesday.

It will be the first time the contest has been staged outside Atlantic City, N.J.

The Aladdin hotel-casino will host the pageant, scheduled to air Jan. 21 on cable channel Country Music Television, organizers said.

“What we wanted to do is find a new host city that has all glitz and glamour Miss America is known for,” said Art McMaster, chief executive of the Miss America Organization, the nonprofit charitable group that runs the annual event. “Obviously Las Vegas is right at the top of this list.”

The pageant has been dogged by financial troubles and slipping viewership in recent years. It was dropped by ABC last year, leaving Miss America without a network TV contract for the first time since 1954.

Paul Villadolid, vice president of programming for Nashville, Tenn.-based CMT, said Las Vegas was chosen because it has a record of putting on first-class shows and for its energy.

McMaster pulled the event from Atlantic City’s Boardwalk Hall in August, citing high production costs, and said it would be held in January instead of on its traditional post-Labor Day date.

Then pageant officials went looking for a host city that would pay for the right to hold the annual competition. McMaster said more than two dozen cities had courted Miss America.

Organizers would not discuss terms of the deal, which was completed this week, but said it was for one year only.

McMaster said it was too soon to tell if Miss America would settle permanently in Las Vegas. “We’re not ruling anything out,” he said.

Organizers noted the move to Las Vegas would necessitate some changes.

Fans have likely seen the last of the Miss America parade, in which all 52 contestants rode down the Boardwalk in convertibles before throngs of spectators.

And Miss America’s victory dip in the ocean, when the winner frolicked in the surf for gawking photographers, would be impossible in landlocked Las Vegas.