… when the company riding to your rescue is Columbia Sussex. Had Tropicana Entertainment not farmed out operation of the Horizon in Lake Tahoe to its William J. Yung III‘s company, it might have been closed outright. As matters stand, Horizon owner Edgewood Cos. is mulling tearing the place down and redeveloping the site. The Trop Ent-out/Col Sux-in arrangement appears to have been a compromise brokered to keep the Horizon open for at least another three years in return for an extension of TropEnt’s MontBleu lease (due to expire in 2018).
But make no mistake: The Horizon is now entering the casino version of hospice care. TropEnt’s swift decimation of the Horizon, to render it as noncompetitive with MontBleu as possible, has already cost it one unlikely set of customers — the South Tahoe High School prom, slated for D-Day.
A prom in a casino? If you need a ballroom, it makes a world of sense, even if it does sound like the setup for a creakier-than-usual Facts of Life episode in which everybody learns A Valuable Lesson about the perils of gambling, or something comparably homiletic.
