The long and short of it is no, nothing has happened on the Westward Ho lot since November 2009 when, a year after work was halted on Boyd Gaming’s Echelon Place metaresort, the cranes were removed and workers finished prepping the site for a complete and indefinite shutdown.
The recent saga of the Westward Ho is a kind of microcosm of the real-estate and development crisis in and around Las Vegas.
In September 2005, it was announced that the long-time owners of the Ho had sold the place to a partnership between Tharaldson, a North Dakota-based hotel company, and Centex, a Dallas-based homebuilder; together, they had big plans to erect high-rise condos during the height of the Vegas condo craze. The Ho closed on schedule, with a big crowd showing up to say goodbye. Over the next few months, the whole property was demolished.
Next, in June 2006, Tharaldson bought out Centex and announced big plans to develop a mixed-use project on the 15-acre site. The unnamed $1.8 billion resort was supposed to include 1,000 condo-hotel units, 600 residential condo units, a 600-room hotel, an 80,000-square-foot casino, and 200,000 square feet of retail. After paying $145.5 million jointly for the Westward Ho, Tharaldson paid another $170 million in the buy-out. No timetable was announced for the new project.
Only four months later, in October 2006, Tharaldson sold the site to Harrah’s.
Harrah’s made a swap with Boyd: Boyd gave Harrah’s the 1.8-acre Barbary Coast property in exchange for the 24 acres it owned on and around the old Westward Ho site. With that acreage next to the Stardust, Boyd now controlled 87 contiguous acres on the north Strip, while Harrah’s controlled more than a mile of contiguous east Strip frontage, from Harrah’s Las Vegas to Paris Las Vegas (later, it picked up Planet Hollywood).
Then, on March 12, 2007, Boyd imploded the 49-year-old Stardust. The 28,000 tons of rubble were cleared in time for an early-summer 2007 groundbreaking for the $4.4 billion Echelon Place project. Ironically, the Boyd metaresort was scheduled to open right around this time in 2010.
Echelon Place made it to the low-rise steel-girder stage before Las Vegas hit the skids and that’s where the Ho site languishes still. When the cranes were removed a year ago, it was announced that work might begin again in 2012, but given the state of the southern Nevada economy, it could be longer than that.
