Future Hotels
MGM Mirage’s shiny new Project CityCenter resort that’s currently being built in Vegas sits neatly next to the Monte Carlo hotel, which also happens to be owned by the company. So, a nice contiguous block of land, with two first class properties standing proudly side by side then?
Not quite. Sandwiched in the middle is a tiny WalGreens drug store (or what we in the UK called Chemist!). Apparently, WalGreens refused to sell their plot of land, and are quite happy running their little store as the western hemisphere’s most expensive privately financed project is built around them.
The Stardust Hotel was a legendary hotel in Las Vegas, with an iconic sign, distinctive building, and playing host to scores of famous acts down the ages. Until, that is, it was demolished in March 2007. Now, it’s just a heap of smouldering rubble, waiting for the new $4 billion Echelon Place to be constructed over its ruins.
This photo set, and others in our new Changing Vegas gallery, shows just how quickly the landscape of Vegas changes. The photo on the left was taken in April 2006, and shows The Stardust in all its glory, standing proudly beneath a glorious blue sky. Fast forward a year, and all that’s left is a smouldering heap of rubble – even the sky’s turned grey! The Stardust is no more, but from its ashes will rise the huge new Echelon Place. Another Vegas icon bites the dust, only to be resurrected as another Vegas mega-resort.
More pictures of the changing face of Vegas after the jump.
Among the many attractions of The Wynn Hotel is its 18 hole golf course, the only one of its kind in Las Vegas, and which was redeveloped when The Wynn was being constructed.
Playing golf amongst beautiful greenery in the middle of the desert is no odder than anything else in Las Vegas, although the site of rolling expanses of lush green lawn certainly makes you do a double-take as you travel past it on the Monorail (above).
However, with spiralling land prices, the temptation to cash in on the huge plot of land on which the golf course sits has encouraged Steve Wynn, The Wynn’s owner, to consider redeveloping it. So if golf’s your game, and you fancy playing in the middle of a desert, better get your round in soon (if you can swallow the $500 per round it costs!), as Wynn has plans…big plans!
The North end of the Vegas strip has being going mad recently, with four new multi-billion dollar casino and hotel resorts currently under construction, and another one about to begin now that El Ad has bought the ageing Frontier and has plans to knock it down and build, yup, another multi-billion dollar casino and hotel!
All this construction work has been encircling the aged Circus Circus hotel, which already looks a bit shabby, but will soon look as bad as The Frontier does compared to its shiny new neighbours The Wynns.
Any thoughts that Circus Circus would be next on the implosion list are soon quashed, however, as its owners, MGM Mirage, are already spending $7.7 billion on Project CityCenter further south of the strip (between the Monte Carlo and The Bellagio), and not even the mighty MGM Mirage could afford to splash out on two huge multi-billion dollar projects at the same time…
…could they?…
Just when you thought you’d seen all the new mega-hotels that are under construction in Vegas, up pops another one! The Fontainebleau will be a $2.8 billion condo hotel and casino that will add yet more rooms, convention space and shopping (of course!) to what is an already seemingly overcrowded city.
The Fontainbleau is being built directly opposite Circus Circus on what used to be the unfashionable north end of the strip (unless you count clowns as the height of fashion!).
However, with the Wynn Encore, Palazzo and Echelon Place all currently under construction in the neighbourhood, and the Frontier scheduled to be replaced by a new Plaza Hotel complex, the north is being transformed into the hot new place to be.
More details of the Las Vegas Fontainebleau after the jump.
This is the New Frontier Hotel on the north side of the Vegas Strip. The photo was taken in 2005 on my first visit to Vegas, and was one of the first hotels I saw. I was staying in Circus Circus (as ever), and was walking up the strip, and had no idea what to expect. The Frontier, with Gilley’s bar and its giant sign proudly proclaiming “Cold Beer, Dirty Girls!” was exactly what I was expecting of Vegas – tacky on a gigantic scale!
Which was part of the reason why I was so amazed as I carried on walking up the strip and saw that the real Vegas is nothing like the impression that the Frontier gives.
And that’s exactly why The New Frontier’s days are numbered…
Vegas hotels used to be a thing of, well, gaudy cheesiness! Circus Circus, Excalibur, and even, to some degree, the huge black pyramid that is the Luxor, all scream novelty at you, and don’t exactly make the place look upmarket.
All that’s changing now, though, and fast. The more recent hotels, from the Bellagio onwards, have all gone progressively upmarket, and newer ones, such as The Wynn and the new hotels under construction, are all top-class 5 star establishments with stunning designs.
This sense of upmarketness is brought dramatically home by these stunning pics I managed to take in April from my room at Circus Circus. The day itself was cold and windy, and there was even rain (it felt just like home in the UK, in fact!), but the payback was the glorious sunset gleaming off the Wynn, with dramatic rolling clouds lending an almost mystical quality to the construction work going on at The Palazzo, Wynn Encore and Echelon Place.
In Vegas, it seems, even the construction sites are glorious!
Check out the much larger photos in the Vegas Construction gallery.
Las Vegas is already known for its mega-casinos, each of which has its own usually-outlandish theme. From Paris to New York, Venice, to the world’s largest black pyramid, these multi-billion dollar hotels and casinos make Las Vegas the stunning spectacle that it is today.
But no matter how crazy you think Vegas is today, just wait until you see what’s coming! Las Vegas is in the middle of a boom, with even more outlandish mega-casinos being built, and tens of billions of dollars being pumped into construction.
Here’s a list of the top 5 Las Vegas mega-casinos that are currently under construction.
One of the surprises of my trip to Vegas this year was Treasure Island (TI). Previously, I’d only ever travelled through it, as the walkway from the Fashion Show Shopping Mall leads you through the TI casino, and then out onto the main strip. I’d never even seen the famous pirates doing their hourly mock battle scene.
But this year was different. One of the days we were too exhausted to go wandering to the bottom of the strip to the MGM and New York New York, and so ended up at Treasure Island (after a fortunately aborted attempt to get into Gilly’s!). We went to the Isla Bar, which was actually pretty chilled, with extremely pleasant waitresses, a nice atmosphere, and good tunes (although they do have to compete with the noise of the slots).
Posted on Sunday, April 29th, 2007 at 9:07 pm by Mike Evans
Filed under
Future Hotels
I just got back from another trip to Vegas, with the last trip being a year ago, and the biggest difference I noticed was the huge amount of construction that’s going on at the moment. Apart form Dubai, Las Vegas must be the biggest building site in the world at the moment, and certainly the richest. From my hotel room at Circus Circus, I could see just four building sites, but they alone are worth over $15 billion!
