Here we go again, covering the Lady Luck.
QoD has never, in all its fabled history, received more questions about a single property than this downtown hotel-casino -- which isn’t even open for business. Does everyone really miss the joint so desperately? Or is it another instance of, in Joni Mitchell’s immortal lyrics, "Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you got till it’s gone"? Or is the same reader sending the question from 50 different email addresses, every week?
Actually, we mourn the LL ourselves, to a certain extent. It was, without a doubt, one of Las Vegas’ great bargain and freebie casinos. We ate more prime rib specials, foot-long hot dogs, and cups of ice cream there than we care to recount. We made lots of free three-minute long-distance phone calls. We took a few turns in the Whirlwind of Cash. We enjoyed comp dinners in the Burgundy Room. We saw lots of performances in the showroom. We even stayed there on occasion when the rooms were so cheap we had to try it. And then there were a couple of cocktail waitresses …
Anyway, the Lady Luck surfaced recently in conjunction with, of all things, the proposed mob museum. The City of Las Vegas is trying to make a deal with CIM Group, the Hollywood-based owners of the Lady Luck and some surrounding property, to invest in one of Mayor Goodman’s pet projects, which will be housed in the old post office building on Stewart Street at Third Avenue, just around the corner from the LL.
The city has raised $15 million of the estimated $39 million the museum will cost to open and operate, and wants CIM to front up additional cash, that will be repaid at a future date in some way, such as a tax abatement, or special consideration for five acres of city-owned park land between the post office and the casino.
Here’s the crux of the matter for our purposes: The idea is to coordinate the debut of the mob museum with the reopening of Lady Luck. According to the stories we’ve seen, this probably won’t happen until at least 2009, and may spill over into 2010.
Pundits predict that an agreement on the mob museum and repayment terms could take several months to negotiate, so we’re not holding our breath for further announcements. But rest assured that as soon as there are any new developments, we’ll be back on the Lady Luck beat.
