New Las Vegas strip hotel-casino as atrociously tacky design roasted in the comments
Vegas is betting big on hearts.Sin City has seen plenty of crazy pitches over the years.This one comes with a 265-foot restaurant bolted onto the bones of a dead Ferris wheel — and a giant, glowing heart.Clark County commissioners approved plans Wednesday for a wild new 752-room hotel-casino directly across from Mandalay Bay, set to rise on one of the Strip’s saddest patches of dirt: the abandoned remains of the never-built SkyVue observation wheel.The proposal calls for a 29-story tower wrapped in a massive heart-shaped LED screen, along with a casino, restaurants, a pool and a Fremont Street-style covered plaza.Not everyone is buying the hype.“Today’s utter bullshit that’s never happening, all due respect to this bulls and shit,” local Vegas insider blog VitalVegas torched in a reply to Clark County’s celebratory announcement on X.The site has been a punchline for nearly 15 years.Developer Howard Bulloch and his firm, Compass Investments, unveiled plans in 2011 for a $100 million-plus spectacle featuring a 500-foot observation wheel, a roller coaster, shops and more, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.Crews barely managed to erect two hulking concrete columns before the money dried up, the newspaper reported.Bulloch later told the Review-Journal that the property had been “in escrow many times,” but prospective buyers “were just not able to arrange their financing as they had promised.”What remained were two towering concrete stumps that have loomed over the tourist trudging toward Mandalay Bay ever since — mocked by locals as the Strip’s “pillars of sadness.”The land was dragged through a bankruptcy auction in 2020, when Seattle businessman Wayne Perry acquired the SkyVue site and neighboring parcels with a $75 million credit bid, according to the Review-Journal.His family later sold roughly 8 acres along the Strip to the Clark County Department of Aviation for $16.2 million in 2023 before unloading the remaining property t...