Short answer? Nothing much. Talk of a "Harmon Strip," extending east from Las Vegas Boulevard to the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino has been making the rounds of the industry since at least 1998. Various casino and hotel projects have been mooted for the northeast corner of Koval Lane and Harmon Avenue for the past dozen years. None has come anywhere close to fruition.
The most notorious "vaporware" proposed for the site was Edge Group/Starwood Resorts’ $2.5 billion W Las Vegas Hotel Casino & Residences. Writing in the Las Vegas Business Press, reporter Tony Illia described the project as "two, 50-story glass towers with a combined 4,000 hotel and condo-hotel units. Residences run from 500 square feet to 3,000 square feet, with prices starting at $650,000. W Las Vegas will also feature 20 restaurants, bars and lounges, as well as 100,000 square feet of shops and a 75,000-square-foot casino. The 24.5-acre site development is scheduled to open in 2009."
Carmen Electra, Paris Hilton, Ahman Walker, Anne Heche Phil Hellmuth and Paul Walker were all mooted as prospective residents. Project backers didn’t let the collapse of two nearby developments, including a condo expansion of the Hard Rock, deter them.
In June 2006, Edge decided to double down on its Harmon/Koval site. It revealed that it had purchased an additional 63 acres, for $202 million. That land had been previously dedicated to the failed "Las Ramblas" resort-condominium project. Edge paid a 63% markup to obtain the acreage. It was to become the basis of "Edge East," a complementary property to W Las Vegas. Edge Resorts President Adam Frank said it would become "a master-planned complex that will feature lifestyle elements that are uniquely aligned with the W Las Vegas project currently being developed."
By year’s end, Edge was already looking for an exit strategy, as some of its prospective tenants defected to CityCenter. One rumor had it that the W/Edge East site would be sold for $750 million to the Morgans Hotel Group-led consortium that had already paid $770 million for the Hard Rock. That didn’t pan out. But why did W crumble so quickly?
"A high percentage of our buyers who had reserved at W have pulled out and reserved at CityCenter or bought a resale at Signature at MGM Grand. The question is one of timing and what's happening in a softening market," luxury realtor Bruce Hiatt told the LVBP. Right now we’re not getting any calls for W." Despite having nearly $233 million in financing lined up from Societe Generale Corporate & Investment Banking, W never broke ground.
Compare that to Frank’s bullish statement seven months earlier: "The market is clearly excited about a W Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas. The interest in our project and the depth of demand for our condo-hotel residences has far exceeded our lofty expectations."
In August 2007, the property was bought by a gaggle of LLCs who paid back taxes on the land and flipped 10% in May 2008 to offshore corporation Sapir TIC, which paid $75 million for a piece of the (in)action. On May 31, 2011, Soviet émigré developer Alex Sapir and co-developers Africa Israel received an extension from the Paradise Town Advisory Board on its plans for the site. These include a pair of 550-foot-plus hotel towers, a thousand hotel rooms, 3,000 condos, a casino and all the other trappings of a Vegas megaresort … quite a scaled-down proposal from the 6,700-plus hotel rooms Africa Israel pitched to Clark County in early 2009 and a lot closer to the original W plan.
However, Sapir’s trophy property, 100 Church St., in New York City, was foreclosed upon by Palms co-owner SL Green. Sapir is also currently a co-defendant, along with Donald Trump, in litigation involving allegedly inflated sales figures at Trump SoHo. The Sapir Organization has been pleading poverty. Africa Israel and Sapir also haven’t put a shovel into 110 acres of land they own south of the junction of Blue Diamond Road and I-15, so don’t expect anything to arise at the less-visible Harmon/Koval intersection for the foreseeable future.
