Question of the Day - 09 January 2020

We hadn’t heard a darn thing about that site in years and years -- until toward the end of November, when the Clark County Commissioners approved zoning permits for 60 acres in the area of Koval and Harmon. Perhaps there's some life on the old Harmon Strip after all. 

Up until the recent approval, the sign that the property is “intended for a hotel-casino” was a longstanding joke. It’s been part of the “Harmon [Avenue] Strip” that was supposed to have been just around the corner for the past couple of decades and has persistently refused to happen. The idea was that, with land becoming less and less available on the Strip, growth would move eastward along Harmon. Except that it never did. The Hard Rock, soon to be rebranded as a Virgin Hotel, continues to be a lonely gambling-resort outpost, roughly a mile east of the Strip.

As for W Hotel, it was a $2.5 billion hotel-condo-casino-retail bit of vaporware that was announced back in 2005 and didn’t survive the collapse of the Las Vegas condo bubble. Starwood and Edge Resorts were to partner on the 21-acre project and Edge even purchased a 25-acre plot next door that was to have been George Clooney’s Las Ramblas resort, earmarking it for “Edge East,” a collection of boutique hotels. However, the whole scheme went south in 2007 when Starwood withdrew.

Edge had been nearer the Strip back when it owned the Bourbon Street Hotel & Casino (home of super-tight slot holds) but Edge Chief Marketing Officer Ross Klein deemed the property too small for redevelopment—which it was—and in a bad location. The latter is an improbable notion, since Bourbon Street sat across from Bally’s Las Vegas. In any event, Harmon Avenue was deemed a more propitious neighborhood.

Edge then bought the two-acre Ice site in 2004, snapping up another 19 acres from D.R. Horton in 2005, for a total tab of $108 million.

The plans for W included 3,000 hotel and timeshare units—later increased to 4,000—and 300,000 square feet of convention space, along with the amenities you would expect from a casino resort. Edge would own 75 percent and Starwood the remainder, making it Starwood’s first casino. A 2008 opening was announced and sales of condos (actually boxes of thin air) to prominent NBA stars were announced.

Initial financing was obtained from a French bank. Edge also sold 63 acres of south Strip land, now the site of Allegiant Stadium, to raise cash for W. By late December 2006 costs were escalating to such a degree that Edge and Starwood started shopping around for a third joint-venture partner.

All this was getting too rich for Starwood’s blood and it bailed on W six months later. That summer Edge sold the accumulated acreage to Africa Israel Group, with whom it hoped to partner on the construction of the world’s largest hotel: 6,745 rooms. (To put that in perspective, Aria has 4,000 rooms.) The project defaulted in the autumn of 2009, leaving the site as you see it now.

But that wasn’t the end of W in Las Vegas. One of the hotel towers at the Sahara is branded (and operated) under the W flag. And Station Casinos has had talks with Starwood about redeveloping the Days Inn at Wild Wild West site into an W hotel. Wild Wild West sits relatively close to the Strip and Station has long wanted to remake the acreage into something more upscale.

Back to the Harmon Strip? For the first time in 15 years ago, something might be in the works. The commissioners approved plans that reportedly include a hotel-casino with high-rise towers, a shopping center, and a five-level underground garage. No other details were revealed. We'll keep an eye on this possibly developing situation, but we won't, in the meantime, be holding our breath.

And here's your link to the new poll on all the mistakes first-time visitors to Las Vegas can make.