No, he didn’t and Don Barden is still the owner of record at the casino he unsuccessfully tried to re-style as "The Fitz." (The name change never caught on.) He put the casino on the market last year, in order to raise cash for a then-insolvent and stymied Pittsburgh casino project. No sale was consummated and Barden was forced to surrender control of the Pennsylvania development, which resumed under new ownership.
Barden is, however, still seeking a buyer for Fitzgeralds, to the best of Vice President of Marketing Teresa Malm’s knowledge. "I’m not aware of any prospective buyers at this tme," she adds. "We continue to do our jobs here."
As for the not-restocked gift shop, Malm says, "We had excess inventory … and we have just been running on that." Sundries will be reordered when existing inventory is sold, she explained.
One asset with which Barden did part was an office building at 302 Carson Ave., which he’d acquired in February 2006. His short-lived plan was to relocate the offices for both Fitzgeralds and his Majestic Star casino company there. It was one of a series of capital improvements that Barden announced at the time, including a Gary, Ind., hotel to serve his two casino riverboats in that market.
Few of these projects were carried out. As Barden prophetically conceded to the Las Vegas Business Press, he had many dreams, but not the capital to fulfill all of them. This was particularly true of his Pittsburgh casino (first called "Esplanade," later "Majestic Star"; it's now "Rivers Casino"), which experienced a 46% cost overrun before Barden was eased out of the project last summer.
If Fitzgeralds remains in Barden’s hands –- and he chose a devilish time to put a low-profile casino on the market –- the Carson Avenue building does not. It was flipped to Thompson National Properties last October for $21.5 million, bringing Barden a tidy $8 million in profit.
"This is totally separate," Grubb & Ellis’ David Scherer says of the transaction, unrelated to the still-pending Fitzgeralds sale.
Thompson National plans to retrofit the office block as a LEED-certified (or "green") building, of which Scherer says, "It’ll be the first existing building I’m aware of in Southern Nevada where that’s being done." Specific details of the retrofit are unavailable at this time.
Barden’s expectations from a resale of Fitzgeralds are modest. However, in an economic climate in which even Strip and near-Strip properties are going begging, it’s probably best not to hold one’s breath waiting for a Fitz flip.
