Boyd Gaming executives firmly refuse to engage in might-have-beens about the Stardust. For them, there's no crying over spilled neon.
At the time it was imploded -- March 13, 2007 -- the hotel-casino was going on 49 years old, so it was definitely getting up there in years. Las Vegas' gambling economy was at a historic apogee and all the major players expected it to continue improving for years to come. Hence Boyd's (precipitate?) decision to pull the trigger on a Stardust demolition and proceed with a multi-hotel megaresort, to be called Echelon.
It's been a long time now since we set foot in the Stardust [and subscribers can read LVA staff (at the time) remembrances about the joint], obviously, but we do recall it as being in good physical condition but showing its age. The showroom, for instance, hewed to the old-school and highly uncomfortable practice of seating customers at a 90-degree angle to the stage. And like many casinos of its vintage, it reeked of cigarette smoke, although not so badly as the New Frontier, another razed Strip casino that has yet to be replaced. In any event, demolishing the Stardust on a 13th proved to be a bad omen. So did the Stardust's dust cloud, which blew into the faces of onlookers, forcing Boyd to cancel a laser show intended to mark the occasion.
Although Boyd did erect the steel structure for much of Echelon within the next 15 months, the tide was on its way out of the Las Vegas economy. Boyd wound down construction on Echelon, mothballing the project on August 1, 2008, well before the market crash that was the onset of the Great Recession and put other Vegas operators in dire straits. However, this has led to no end of second-guessing about what might have been had Boyd kept the Stardust open.
The company, obviously, still would have had a Strip presence, but Boyd sets little store by that today. After all, it just walked away from its half-interest in the Borgata in Atlantic City, a casino that was a far bigger cash cow than the Stardust. The latter's cachet and Boyd's player database would probably have kept it performing respectably through the Great Recession. However, it would almost certainly have faced the same economic challenge and suffered the same slow demise that were the undoing of the Sahara and Riviera, especially after the demolition of the New Frontier and the Westward Ho, increasing the isolation of the remaining north-Strip casinos. And the Sahara's reinvention as SLS Las Vegas demonstrates the constraints faced when trying to resurrect a Strip casino within the bones of its predecessor.
The timing might have been different, but we think that Boyd leadership would have eventually done what they did: imploded the Stardust. True, they could have sold it to a buyer for whom a Strip foothold was a higher priority and maybe they're kicking themselves over that, hindsight being 20-20 and all. Also, the real indignity for Boyd was the price it received when it eventually sold the Stardust land to Genting Group -- $4 million an acre for Strip frontage valued at $15 million per acre.
Long story short, we don't see a different endgame for the Stardust, even had Boyd leadership been gifted with clairvoyance. It might have eked out another five years or so, but we can't imagine it still being in business today.
