Harrah's Entertainment continues to demolish the low-rise apartment dwellings it accumulated behind its Barbary Coast/Flamingo/Imperial Palace/Harrah's Las Vegas cluster of properties. Also, a shiny new fleet of construction trailers now sits where Bourbon Street's hotel tower once did. Could we be seeing the first stirrings of "Epicentre"?

Regardless, apartment owner Oscar Nuñez, whose sad, little buildings are surrounded by more and more piles of rubble, looks the Big Loser of 2007. He squandered his opportunity to sell out to Gary Loveman when the market was at its height and Loveman was on a buying spree. Now he's missed his moment and will probably either have to settle for a depressed price or watch Harrah's build up all around him just out of spite.

Incidentally, we passed the now-infamous corner of Koval and Winnick the other night, on our way back from The Palazzo, and couldn't help but think: If there's anything left in the state budget other than a few pennies, nickels and some lint when Gov. Jim Gibbons finishes demolishing it, perhaps the Nevada Historial Society could erect an historical marker at the Koval/Winnick nexus, commemorating the sad story of Javon Walker -- if he ever gets it straight, that is.

Direct Strip access is the holy grail of megaresort design -- and those, like the Aladdin/Planet Ho, who ignore it do so at their own peril. Unfortunately, this means gnarly tangles of pedestrians, cars, buses ... everything except rickshaws, when a crosswalk (er, "pedestrian realm") must vie with the grand entrance of a Paris Las Vegas, say.

Kudos to Boyd Gaming, then, for circumventing this problem by planning a pedestrian tunnel "underneath the main project driveway" at Echelon, 151 feet long by 20 feet wide (the Strip is to the lower R-hand side of the rendering, above.) To provide some visual compensation, Boyd plans to line the tunnel with glass display cases (contents unspecified).

If there's anything to regret, it'