Love-ly casino resort
The Las Vegas Strip might get more interesting looking in the next few years. On Wednesday, Clark County commissioners approved a plan to develop land across from Mandalay Bay into a 752-room casino resort, featuring a hotel tower with a giant, heart-shaped façade.
It sounds like quite the ambitious project – a massive LED screen will lay on top of the heart-shape façade and the property will have a covered pedestrian plaza and a restaurant that will be an attraction in its own right. The eatery will be suspended over 250 feet in the air, held up by the skeletal remains of a long-abandoned project.
Sitting on the land where the casino resort will go, besides nothing, are two giant concrete columns that reach skyward, a reminder of what was supposed to be the 500-foot SkyVue Las Vegas Super Wheel. A third column will be added and the other two will be reinforced to serve as a tripod for the scarily high restaurant.
Blight site
Compass Investments’ Howard Bulloch, the former developer of SkyVue, saw the site as a retail, dining, and entertainment hub, with the gigantic ferris wheel, restaurants, shops, and a rollercoaster. The first phase, which included the wheel’s supports, was completed in 2012.
But financial issues cropped up and Bulloch put the land up for sale in 2015. He wasn’t able to close a deal with a buyer and in 2020, a sale was finally approved through bankruptcy court. Businessman Wayne Perry bought the site plus others for $75 million.
But Perry didn’t accomplish much with it, either. In 2023, his family sold eight acres to the Clark County Department of Aviation for $16.2 million. This past April, Eli Applebaum, the developer of the new casino project, acquired the site.
Applebaum’s original plan included a hotel that was over 100 rooms larger, but he shortened the tower by several stories so that the Federal Aviation Administration would give it the thumbs up.
Image credit: Steelman Partners and Brown, Brown, and Premsrirut
