You do! Your hotel clerk was right. They are timeshares (contrary to what LVA was informed by the front desk at the end of last year, as you recall correctly). Although the tower will be Silverton-branded, Grandview of Las Vegas will be the owner and operator of the property. The Silverton will have no involvement with it. Silverton owner Ed Roski’s Majestic Real Estate will continue to own the underlying land.
When completed, the timeshare tower will contain 390 units spread over 20 stories. It is scheduled to open early this year. InsideTheGate.com reports that is a downsized version of a much grander expansion that the Silverton mulled in 2005. That plan would have sprawled over 80 acres, incorporating a second casino, at least five hotel towers, additional retail and as many as 1,500 timeshare units. Then the air went out of the condo bubble, followed by the Great Recession, and Grandview's condos were downsized accordingly. (For more on this and other Silverton expansion/upgrade plans, some of which came to fruition and others which did not, check out the answer referenced above.)
For those of you unfamiliar with the Silverton, Roski’s first scheme for it, in 1989, was to build a warehouse on the site. Then, four years later, he teamed with Boomtown Inc. to construct a Boomtown-branded casino. Roski was bought out of the project when it opened in 1994. However, Boomtown went bust and, as part of Boomtown’s absorption by Hollywood Park in 1997, it was sold back to Roski for $10.6 million (chump change!), mostly in I.O.U.s.
Roski’s first order of business was to re-theme the casino as the Silverton, redoing the casino-hotel in a hunting lodge motif. Among other Roski quirks was an aquarium just off the casino floor, complete with stingrays and sharks, along with a daily mermaid show. In 2004, he added an enormous Bass Pro Shop, featuring a flume, ducks, and a gun store, making Silverton the only Las Vegas casino to have its own pistol range. Whether in its design or the affordability of its restaurants, the Silverton stands out from the bigger Las Vegas picture, thanks to Roski’s unconventional individuality.
While details of the Silverton timeshare expansion were hard to come by (neither Silverton nor Grandview executives returned LVA's phone calls), foodies got a bit of good news last week, namely that the watercraft-sales acreage at Silverton will be repurposed as the site of Las Vegas' first Cracker Barrel. Other restaurants may follow but only Cracker Barrel has been confirmed at this point. For those of you unfamiliar with Cracker Barrel, VegasEater.com's Susan Stapleton paints a vivid picture of "Southern dining atmosphere … such as a hash brown casserole, meatloaf, cherry cobbler, and plenty of biscuits. Marketing lore notes each restaurant features a front porch with wooden rocking chairs, a wooden peg solitaire game on every table, a stone fireplace with a deer head, at least one shotgun, and a traffic light."
