A good link about the casino industry

I haven't stopped by the Stiffs and Georges blog for a while, shame on me.  The ins and outs of the gaming business is interesting to me, although a good deal of it is over my head, non-businessman that I am. 

I popped in and found a great post today.  David McKee actually does understand these things, and, like me, he is a bit suspicious about the whole Sahara rebuilding/rebranding process.

Anyway it's interesting stuff, and a great blog.

Five Weeks for Sahara Sam

Now have a nice day.

Rebuilding the Lady Luck

Really?

I went to the Lady Luck once. After a having a good time on Fremont Street, I'm a bit hazy on the fine points, but mostly I remember the place was smoky. 

One of the sites I check pretty regularly is Vegaschatter.  It's a great site.  Today there was an article about the old Lady Luck, which was recently rebranded the Downtown Grand.  Personally, I think Lady Luck is a way better name, but so it goes.  The article talks about how the place is being refurbished, and offers some speculation as to when it might open up again.

I'm sorry, but I just don't believe it. 

The Lady Luck closed for renovations in 2006.  It hasn't opened the doors since.  Anyone who has been downtown has seen it, it's big, white, and takes up a whole lot of space between the Fremont Street Experience and the new Mob Museum.  Whenever I'm downtown, I walk by the place just to see what's happening.  I've never seen much.  While work has certainly taken place on Third Street in front of the old hotel, I've never seen any real action at the hotel itself.  I haven't been there in a year, of course, so my observations are dated, but if the owners really are gearing up for an opening, they are certainly taking their own sweet time.

Maybe this wouldn't bother me so much if the owners didn't keep saying they were working on it.  People understand why the Echelon and the Fontainebleau were mothballed, people get that the money doesn't add up to reopen the place.  But these guys just keep throwing out plans, artists renditions, and pretend re-opening dates (vegaschatter sites five different dates).  Ex-Mayor Oscar Goodman has called the place a "blight", a "rotting corpse", a "disaster" and a "carcass"  Through it all, the owners, Third Street Gaming,  have kept talking about renovations, reopenings, rebrandings, and all the great things that were coming.

And yet the place still sits. Empty.  Hulking.  Just plane ugly. 

I hope I'm wrong.  When I go in July, I'll again walk down to the old Lady Luck.  I'll look for trucks, cranes, some signs of life.  Then maybe I'll believe.

Maybe.

Is the old Sahara being rebuilt?

A while ago, there were a few articles noting that the owner of the old Sahara was looking for money to redevelop the place.  Yeah, right, I thought - who's going to throw millions at rebuilding the Sahara, smackdab in the fading wasteland of the north strip?

Maybe I was wrong.  Maybe.  I stumbled on an article in Bloomberg a while ago that the money is there, and the redo is on.  Vegaschatter has written quite a bit about it too, as has Two Way Hard Three and a bunch of other blogs.

I'm terribly sceptical by nature, so I'll believe it when I see cranes and trucks at the site.  Personally, I hope it's for real.  While the north end of the strip is pretty barren in spots, I don't think it's so far gone (yet) that it can't come back, and I'm not such a jerk that I'm trying to put a downer on a project that will bring jobs to LV. So I really hope it's true.

The cynic in me, however, keeps thinking of the "redo" that was promised (a few times) at the old Lady Luck, which still sits empty, ugly, and depressing downtown.