Las Vegas is a fascinating city. In particular, the history of the town fascinates me, because it is fluid and fleeting. Today’s Observations on the News turns its eyes to the southern Nevada desert:
From the Another One Bites The Dust Department: Yesterday, the Stardust Las Vegas closed its doors for the last time. The Stardust opened July 2, 1958, as the world’s largest hotel and catered to middle America with $6-a-night rooms and low-minimum stakes gambling. It was the dream of Tony Cornero, a mob boss who turned a cavernous unthemed building into one of Las Vegas’ largest hotel. Overtime, it grew to include the Royal Nevada next door. Yesterday, it closed, an aging 48-year lady in a city that wants them young and beautiful. The company is auctioning off equipment, photos and other mementoes beginning Nov. 17–in total, about 70,000 items that will be available for auction. These items will include craps, blackjack, and roulette tables, but not slot machines, because they are not allowed to be owned by citizens according to Nevada state laws. The slot machines will be distributed to other properties on the strip that are owned by Stardust parent company Boyd Gaming. The famous 18-story Stardust sign is being donated to the Neon Museum, a local nonprofit group that hopes to restore it. Going up to replace the Stardust is $4 billion Echelon Place, which will feature five luxury hotel towers, upscale retail, 28 bars and restaurants, a 700,000-square-foot convention center and 300,000 square feet of high-end retail. Echelon Place will open in 2010.
[Sources: Casino Gambling Web, Poker News, Las Vegas Sun, Seattle PI]- From the And Some Soldier On Department: But all of old Vegas is not lost. The Riviera has decided to stop looking for buyers, and to focus instead on attracting new customers to the 51-year old result. Riviera Las Vegas President Robert Vannucci said they hope to increase the value of the company in part by converting alll the slots in the Nevada and Colorado casinos to ticket in-ticket out machines and by luring former Stardust customers. The Riviera believes that the Stardust’s value-oriented, old-school customers are “more comfortable with our style of operations” than they are with newer, costlier Strip resorts.
[Source: Las Vegas Review Journal (Riviera)]Further down the strip, the Tropicana has also received a reprieve of sorts. The president of the new owner of the resort told Nevada gaming regulators Wednesday the Tropicana wouldn’t be shut down once his company’s $2.75 billion buyout of Aztar Corp. is completed. Instead, the resort and its 34-acre site would be the recipient of an estimated $2 billion remodeling project that will give it more than 8,000 hotel rooms and an additional hotel brand. Both Tropicana hotel towers would remain, but the rooms would be renovated. A proposed rendering showed five additional hotel towers being constructed on the site that is bordered by Tropicana Avenue and the Strip. One of the new hotel towers would be dedicated to a yet-to-be determined hotel brand. The Tropicana’s casino will remain open during the construction, but eventually closed to make way for a newer gaming area. New public areas, such as restaurants and entertainment venues, would also be added. 600,000 square feet of convention space would be part of the new design. The goal is to have the Trop remain a place for middle-market gaming consumers, meaning they are also going after former Stardust customers.
[Source: Las Vegas Review Journal (Tropicana)] - From the You Gotta Know When To Hold Them, You Gotta Know… Department: Turning to downtown, it looks like it will be at least another year before the shuttered Lady Luck in downtown is replaced. The 743-room hotel-casino closed in February and the facility’s operator, Downtown Resorts, has spent much of the year demolishing the inside structure of the casino to give designers a clean slate. It now looks like it would be at least late 2007 or early 2008 before the Lady Luck, which will be renamed, is reopened.
[Source: Las Vegas Review Journal (Lady Luck)]Moving out of the city itself, MGM Mirage is selling it’s three hotel-casino properties in Primm NV (formerly Stateline) to Herbst Gaming. The $400 million sale includes 2,644 rooms and 136,000 square feet of casino space at the Buffalo Bill’s, Primm Valley and Whiskey Pete’s hotel-casinos, but not the 537-acre Primm Valley Golf Club. MGM is going to be focusing on their other properties; although the Primm casinos brought in $35 million to $40 million in annual operating earnings, they didn’t move folks to the larger properities. Herbst, on the other hand, is happy. These properties will be their crown jewels. I wouldn’t be surprised to see these properties renamed, and to see the gas stations become Terribles.
[Source: Los Angeles Times]
