Question of the Day - 19 November 2018

At the top of the list would have to be the former New Frontier site, which has passed from Phil Ruffin to Elad Properties to James Packer to Wynn Resorts. Steve Wynn was talking about a “Wynn West” for the site before his licentious past caught up with him. New CEO Matt Maddox has gone quiet on the subject. His priorities are to A) hang onto Encore Boston Harbor in Massachusetts and B) redo the plan for Paradise Park to remake it as a “luxury” resort. It’s doubtful anything will happen on the New Frontier site for several years yet.

Next up would be the unfinished Fontainebleau. It will be renamed The Drew (after owner Steven Witkoff’s deceased son) and marketed under the Marriott flag. Financing for finishing the semi-complete resort (a multi-billion-dollar task) is reportedly going slow, despite Witkoff’s vows to resume construction this year. Although F-bleau backers have long touted the project as “70% complete,” it’s never looked that way to us, especially after interim owner Carl Icahn stripped it of its furnishings. Taking down the construction crane was perhaps the most telling bit of symbolism in the property’s troubled history. When these two projects open, it'll help cure the isolation of the north Strip from the tourist core farther south.

Then, perhaps, MGM Resorts International will feel emboldened to re-re-develop the southwest corner of Sahara Avenue and the Strip. MGM already developed the land once as a music-festival site. But Rock in Rio was a bust and little has happened there since. A CityCenter North was once proposed for the site, but nothing has been heard in that regard for many years. We suspect some manner of megaresort will arise there eventually, especially since the site backs onto the underutilized Circus Circus acreage, much of which is taken up with an RV park and low-rise motel units.

As for ex-SkyVue observation wheel, developer Howard Bulloch put the acreage on the market in 2016 at $10 million an acre. As of mid-2018, he hadn’t found someone to take it off his hands. Demolition of SkyVue’s twin pillars may be a partial deterrent, but as Las Vegas Review-Journal reporter Eli Segall writes, “The east side of [Las Vegas Boulevard South] seems almost cursed, given its history of failures,” some of which are also associated with Bulloch.

That’s nothing compared to the “Harmon Strip,” extending east from the Las Vegas Strip, a chimera that developers have been pursuing for 20 years. In theory, a procession of hotels, casinos, and condominiums would march MGM Grand to the Hard Rock Hotel, but nothing has ever happened. 

The Ice nightclub that you passed was shut down in 2006 to make room for a $1.7 billion W Hotel. Condo buyers, including at least one NBA star, were announced, as developers sold boxes of thin air. But the project never got past the talking stage. Ice took its name, incidentally, from “a fog machine that would submerge the dance floor in a dense cloud of liquid nitrogen, dramatically dropping the temperature of the entire club,” according to a Las Vegas Weekly obituary.

As for the Harley Davidson Café, it was closed for no good reason in 2016, other than owner Metroflag intended to build a luxury resort on the site it occupied, along with the failed adjoining Hawaiian Marketplace. We’re not holding our breath, as this is yet another project that hasn’t gotten out of the starting blocks, probably due to the continuing difficulty of financing Vegas development, even on the Strip. 

All-Net Arena's Jackie Robinson found this out the hard way when Credit Suisse pulled out of his project, located just south of SLS Las Vegas. The former Wet ’n Wild site, the underlying land belongs to Archon Corp., which has mostly rented it out as a parking lot for construction equipment. Robinson doesn’t have any equity to put into All-Net, a weird hybrid of basketball arena (potentially rendered superfluous by T-Mobile Arena), hotel and nightclubs, so he’s totally at the mercy of the banks. The footprint is also, by contemporary standards, small, so that will present another challenge.

And to Robinson’s northwest is the former Lucky Dragon Casino. It’s hard to see how anyone could make a go of this curio: a boutique casino and tiny hotel (203 rooms), off the Strip and designed to cater almost exclusively to Chinese players. For starters, it would have to be de-themed with a vengeance and somehow linked to a hotel chain with a significant customer database.

There are plenty of challenges in Las Vegas at present, but Lucky Dragon might be the biggest.