Yes, the Harmon Hotel is being dismantled, the first Vegas resort to be demolished without ever having hosted a single guest. MGM Resorts International employees began removing scrap metal from the structure on June 20, the beginning of a one-year procedure. Construction ceased in 2008 when building inspectors found construction defects in July of that year.
"Rebar deficiencies" were discovered by an inspector for engineering firm Halcrow Yolles. "By that point, much of the reinforcing iron had been buried in concrete," reported the Las Vegas Sun. Ron Lynn, director of development services for Clark County told the newspaper, "In some cases the number of rebar was wrong and in some places it was in the wrong place." On 15 floors, according to a county report, "it had been found in the field that the link beams reinforcing has severely deficient items, such as reinforcing torch cut, misaligned and missing cap ties."
The deficiencies went long unnoticed because county monitors only checked the lowest floors and the defective rebar didn’t begin until the fifth floor. Lynn pleaded that he had insufficient manpower to do a more thorough job.
It also came to light that construction work in Clark County frequently ran ahead of the approval of plans. "We would just let them go, go, go, go and get them stamped later. The whole idea is not to slow down the project. When we catch mistakes later they have to go back and do jack-hammering or add stuff, put it back in," said an anonymous building inspector.
MGM commissioned an assessment of the Harmon by Weidlinger Associates, one of whose structural engineers opined that the building would collapse in an earthquake and that it would take a year just to figure out how to save the tower. Wrote Chukwuma G. Ekwueme, "In a code-level earthquake, using either the permitted or current code-specified loads, it is likely that critical structural members in the tower will fail and become incapable of supporting gravity loads, leading to a partial or complete collapse of the tower." Clark County independently reached the same conclusion, sealing the Harmon’s fate.
Lead contractor Perini Tutor, facing the loss of a $393.8 million paycheck, repeatedly contended that the building was safe and could be put right with several million dollars’ worth of remedial work. MGM, however, was unpersuaded. Several court fights over whether MGM could begin demolition kept the Harmon on life support for three more years. Even after Perini evidently gave up on saving the building (and face), it contended that dismantling the tower would prejudice the jury pool for its upcoming trial against MGM. It also argued that it needed to gather evidence from the building. This bought it one, last reprieve in January, but Perini eventually ran out of appeals and time, and the windows started coming off Harmon.
MGM had, for its part, put the delay to good use. It had wrapped the Harmon with ads for Cirque du Soleil’s Viva Elvis and its successor, Zarkana. This made it, in effect, the biggest (and most expensive) billboard in Las Vegas.
