It’s been a decade since Scandia Fun Center bit the dust. It was part of a giant real estate play by Station Casinos and Manhattan-based developers Fisher Bros. that involved buying up land from Scandia all the way north to the shadow of Palace Station. While plans were never fully disclosed, except to some representatives of the Richfield Village neighborhood, which would have been heavily affected by the development, in essence a series of condo towers would have marched down I-15 from Palace Station to the former Scandia Fun Center acreage, similar to the $600 million 700-unit Kallisto high-rise complex proposed for the land by Las Vegas-based Highrise Partners prior to its 2005 sale to Fisher Bros.
However, new collaborative plan hit snags. Some real estate speculators got wind of what Fisher Bros. was doing and snapped up Richfield Village homes, then flipped them to Fisher at vastly inflated prices. Other homeowners wouldn't budge, period, even though Station had purchased other houses in the area to provide new domiciles for displaced homeowners. More importantly, Station got hit with the double whammy of Chapter 11 and the collapse of the Vegas condo bubble. The houses that were meant to make way for high rises were converted to rental properties and what was Scandia Fun Center remained just a bare patch of dirt.
(Station Casinos shareholder Colony Capital was mulling Las Vegas as a potential site for relocation of Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch. Scandia Fun Center was one of two Station-owned sites that were likely candidates, the other being Wild Wild West, but Scandia enjoyed a prominent view from I-15. Then Station went bust and Colony's ownership position was wiped out, along with any more talk of Neverland-in-Vegas.)
In October of 2011, Station met with Richfield Village residents, to allay their concerns about the company's request to rezone Scandia as industrial land. Station's actual goal, it said, was to build a water park on the site. It was a good idea, as the Las Vegas area didn’t have one at the time (two were subsequently built, but out in the suburbs). For reasons best known to itself, Station never got around to the water park. It did, however, have a Plan B: It rented the site to Dig This Vegas, where you can pay to drive bulldozers and earth-movers. Even eight-year-olds can run some of the machinery. For $249, you can spend 90 minutes tooling about in either an excavator. That's a heavy price but, hey, it's heavy equipment.
Wet 'n Wild – which opened in 1985 -- lives on in name and spirit, as the moniker of a new water park in the southwest corner of the Las Vegas Valley, whose investors include Andre Agassi and Steffi Graff. Its predecessor used to occupy the space immediately south of the Sahara Hotel & Casino (now SLS Las Vegas). Its attractions included a seven-story tower called Der Stuka. Enormous heaters maintained a water temperature of 80 degrees and the park went through 600 pounds of chlorine a day.
Unfortunately for the park's longevity, it was sitting on land leased from Archon Corp., run by businessman Paul Lowden and his politically ambitious wife Sue. They booted Wet 'n Wild from its Strip location in 2004 and tore it down, hoping to capitalize on the casino-development boom that was happening on the Strip.
Archon, which was a small-potatoes casino company, initially announced a 3,250-foot megaresort. Had the Lowdens put the 27 acres on the market at the time, it could have gone for as much as $475 million, before the bottom fell out of Strip land values. Now they would be lucky to obtain half that amount. Texas businessman Christopher Milam's eye fell upon the property in 2006 and he announced the first in a series of purchase agreements, this one to buy Wet 'n Wild for $450 million, with the goal of erecting a Stratosphere-like towering casino on the site, with 4,500 suites.
Two and a half years later, Milam was still making multi-million-dollar deposits on the site and was searching for a partner, a deal with Australian billionaire James Packer's Crown Ltd. having fallen through. (For those of you unfamiliar with Packer, he's the late Kerry Packer's son and Mariah Carey's fiancé.)
Eventually, Milam abandoned his quest. In December 2013, former UNLV basketball player Jackie Robinson announced plans to fill the Wet 'n Wild site with a 22,000-seat arena. It was to have everything except the kitchen sink: a wedding chapel, spa, nightclub, retail and – almost as an afterthought – an arena that would include 75 luxury boxes, 25 executive suites and 50 corporate boxes. Called the All-Net Arena, the $690 million pipe dream should have been called the All-Debt Arena because Robinson didn't plan to put any equity into the project, relying upon banks and EB-5 Visa investors from overseas.
Although a symbolic groundbreaking was held in 2014 (six months after construction on rival T-Mobile Arena had begun), the next year and a half passed without Robinson commencing work on his rival project, which had been set to open in 2017. Two factors almost guarantee that the project will never come to fruition. One is that SLS Las Vegas has been such a financial disaster (and nearby Lucky Dragon Casino is struggling to find completion funding) that lenders are wont to be leery of the still-isolated north Strip. Another is that MGM Resorts International has leapfrogged Robinson with T-Mobile Arena, now merely days from opening, holding 20,000 spectators and costing only $375 million dollars -- $315 million less than Robinson's pipe dream. When last visited by LVA staff, the old Wet 'n Wild site was overflow parking for SLS.
