Friday, August 12, 2011

Which Las Vegas Hotel Imploded Next?

There's a blog post over at Vegas Tripping discussing which hotels are most likely to be imploded in Las Vegas.

I was thinking about it, and came up with these 5 hotels I think could be imploded in the near future:

Sahara - The hotel is already closed so step one is out of the way. Owner Sam Nazarian insists that he will be opening a re-branded Sahara in 2014, but most people agree that's never going to happen.

Harmon - Construction issues caused this never-opened CityCenter hotel to be capped at around 50% of its planned height. Repairing the building might be more trouble than it's worth.

Fontainebleau - Like the Harmon, this hotel might be taken down before it even opens. One of the tallest buildings in Vegas, the Font was left 70% complete when the owners ran out of money. Finishing the resort will cost well over a billion dollars, and nobody has that kind of money anymore. Another case where implosion would be cheaper than completion.

Hooters - The bankrupt hotel will continue operations for now, but if things get bad enough I wouldn't be surprised if it closed down eventually. Implosion would make room for a new Tropicana parking lot.

O'Sheas - This is a wild card because it won't be imploded, and isn't even a hotel. It will likely be de-themed and re-named for Project Linq though, which will effectively wipe it off the map.

A building that will never be imploded is the Jockey Club. Steve Friess had an interesting article in the Sun today about why the Jockey Club will live forever. The article mentioned Controlled Demolition Inc. (the company that does all of the Las Vegas implosions) already has a general plan of how to implode almost every hotel in Vegas. That's a scary thought.