New pictures of Echelon Place

How to erase a 2,400 room hotel in 3 months

Boyd Gaming has announced that they’ve broken ground on the construction of the new Echelon Place. What this means is that the last of the detritus of the old Stardust Hotel has now been cleared away, and work can begin in earnest on building the mammoth new Echelon Place Hotel Resort.

The old Stardust hotel, the remains of which Echelon Place is being built on top of, was a 2,400 room icon of the strip that had been around for nearly 49 years.

It took just 3 months to erase it from the face of the Earth.

Kind of sad, really - until you remember that the Stardust was mostly famous for Wayne Newton and what can only be described as an out-dated heap of a hotel that was looking older by the day!

In its place will come Echelon Place, which will feature five distinct hotels and condos, each with their own theme, together with 300,000 square fee of retail space, 750,000 square feet of convention space, and entertainment galore.

Incidentally, Wayne Newton signed a 10-year deal with The Stardust worth $25 million a year. Think of how much better the place could have looked if they’d spent the cash on the building rather than the entertainer!

Boyd Gaming included more details of what’s coming with Echelon Place, which you can read about after the jump. Apparently, there are more renderings of how Echelon Place will look, too, but they haven’t been released yet. Needless to say I’ll publish them just as soon as they are.

80 billion dollars of new Vegas hotels

I’ve reported before that there’s currently $30 billion’s worth of construction going on around the Las Vegas strip, with high profile hotels such as Project CityCenter, Echelon Place, Fontainebleau, Encore at Wynn and the Palazzo all under various stages of construction.

But $30 billion is not enough for Las Vegas - if you’re going to gamble, you might as well do it large, and if the whole city’s going to gamble with its future, large means really large!

Aaron Auxier has compiled a list of projects that are about to begin or are in the planning stage, and has calculated that the list of new projects comes to another $30 billion! Read on to see what else is coming Vegas’s way.

Las Vegas WET water park keeps the south Strip fun

Las Vegas WET is a new water-based theme park that is somewhat bucking the trend of the latest round of Las Vegas construction projects. Whereas everyone else is currently focusing on the north end of the strip, building their fancy luxurious multi-billion dollar hotels around Circus Circus, Las Vegas WET is focusing on the south side of the strip.

It’s also decided to eschew the latest trend of building luxurious hotels (some of which don’t even come with the ubiquitous casino), and gone back to what Vegas does best - themes. Las Vegas WET will be a huge 200 acre theme park with some incredible attractions that will make Disneyland look tiny by comparison.

More details on Las Vegas WET after the jump.

Las Palmas - another new multi-billion-dollar Vegas hotel

The Peebles Corporation have obviously looked at all the new mega-hotels that are currently being built at the north end of the Vegas strip, and thought to themselves “you know what this area could do with? Another multi-billion dollar mega-hotel!”

So that’s just what they’re going to do. They’ve bought 13 acres of land just easy of the Wynn on Paradise Road, and are going to build a $2.5 billion hotel and condo development that will be called Las Palmas Hotel and Residence.

Read more about the Las Palmas Hotel in Vegas after the jump.

Frontier to close July 15th

The Frontier, which has been on the expected-to-be-demolished list for some time now, has finally got a closing date: midnight July 15th. The Frontier was looking increasingly ropey, and the only “attraction” (if that’s the right word!) was Gilley’s, the red-neck club featuring topless bull-riding girls and bikini mud wrestling.

So in just a month’s time, gone will be the legendary sign boasting “cold beer, dirty girls”, and in its place will rise the swanky $5 billion 3,500 room Plaza hotel and casino. Quite a contrast! Another legendary Vegas icon will have been imploded and another mega-hotel will rise from its ashes.

It also seems that the Plaza development is being expanded, with a lot more retail space planned for the hotel, and maybe some more condo units.

[Source: Las Vegas Review Journal, SkyscraperPage]

New Vegas Hotels dwarf their older neighbours

As the north end of the Vegas strip goes mad with multi-billion dollar developments, one thing has become increasingly clear - these new Vegas hotels and casinos are monsters! As if the existing hotels weren’t big enough, the new hotels currently under development are dwarfing their older neighbours.

As you can see from this shot, the Wynn already dominates the older Mirage, while the new Palazzo and Wynn Encore will be bigger still. Add Echelon Place and the 63-storey Fontainebleau to the mix, and the older hotels are in danger of disappearing beneath their shadows!

Pictures of the new Fontainebleau Hotel finally revealed

The Fontainebleau hotel and casino, currently under construction on the north end of the Las Vegas strip, has managed something few other new hotels have managed in Vegas - secrecy. Despite the fact the Fontainebleau is actually being built, nobody has seen any renderings or artists’ impressions of what the building will look like.

Until now that is. Grainy though this scanned image is (courtesy of Las Vegas Review Journal’s print edition), this is what the new Fontainebleau will look like when it’s completed at the end of 2009 - and it looks stunning!

Read more on the Fontainebleau hotel after the jump.,

The completed Palazzo

The Palazzo is slowly starting to take shape. The new hotel being built between The Wynn and The Venetian is set to open later this year (though more likely early next year), but for those who can’t wait to see what it looks like, here’s an artist’s impression!

The main hotel is the large left building, while the building towards the right is a new condo that’s being built as part of the new complex. You can just about see the existing Venetian sandwiched between the two.

Crown Las Vegas - a 1,888 foot tall hotel coming to the North of the Strip

Following on from the succession of new multi-billion dollar mega-hotels currently being built at the north end of the Las Vegas strip comes news of, well, another new multi-billion dollar mega hotel.

Called the Crown Las Vegas, the new hotel resort will be built next to the $3.4 billion Fontainebleau that’s currently being built opposite Circus Circus.

Crown Las Vegas will be slightly different from other hotels in Las Vegas though.

At 1,888 feet tall, and with 142 stories, it’ll be the tallest building in Las Vegas by a mile, dwarfing even The Stratosphere.

Actually, it’ll be the tallest building in the Western hemisphere!

More details and pictures of the Crown Las Vegas after the jump.