Resorts World LV: Look familiar?

A reader in Arizona asks the question that was on my mind yesterday and probably yours, too: “Is it just me … or does this look like just a copper/gold-colored version of CityCenter?”
Agreed! (With a large helping of Mandalay Bay slopped around the front and sides. Look, if you want originality, you don’t phone up Paul Steelman.) Not only that, it vaguely resembles Jim Murren‘s original “bubble drawings” for CityCenter, with “Aria” now moved to the Strip and “Veer Towers” out back along Industrial Drive. The double-amputee on the south side represents Morgans Hotel Group‘s abortive, two-hotel participation in Echelon (a Mondrian and a Delano) and a sixth hotel tower (let’s call it “Mandarin Oriental”) stands where General Growth Properties‘ retail mall would have been.

Ominously, the area earmarked for a theater and flyloft has been, in the Steelman version, steam-ironed into low-rise, back-of-house space. So there’s going to be some discreet dis-assembly Echelon taking place, to say nothing of adding the giant, turtle-shell pavilion that will fill in the center of the metaresort. (Is Gammera coming for a visit?) The “aerial” views don’t include many of the faux-Oriental doodads that are going to accessorize the hotel exteriors and which make them look not a little bit like Sands Cotai Central, come to think of it …

However, if the Genting and Sheldon Adelson projects must acknowledge common parentage, the proud papa would not be Murren but … the late Ralph Engelstad. Yes, retro-Vegas fans, Imperial Palace has risen from the grave — and bigger and wackier than ever, too!

Update: An error in yesterday’s Echelon obituary has been corrected. J.P. Morgan‘s Joseph Greff valued the entire 87 acres at $50 million — a truly dismal valuation for Strip land and one that pulls the whole damn floor out from under Carl Icahn‘s efforts to sell Fontainebleau. If Greff represents the thinking of the market at large, it’ll be a very long time before Icahn gets the price he wants ($15 million an acre or more) for that site, especially with half-finished F-blew sitting on top of it, slowly disintegrating. Also, a few extra links have been added to provide additional historical context. That “panda habitat” idea of Genting’s is so old that Mandalay Resort Group will still an active entity when it was first proposed. I love pandas but unless Genting has access to some black market, under-the-table sources for live pandas, I’ll believe it when and if I see it.