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 this spring, the outlet reported.

That’s where Eli Applebaum and his heart-shaped box come into play.

The developer, working through his Kulik River Capital firm, dropped $70 million in April to acquire the nearly 12-acre parcel.

His answer to nearly 15 years of blight is the towering heart-shaped resort, complete with a gaming floor, restaurants, retail space, a pool, convention facilities and a covered outdoor plaza, county documents show.

The most audacious feature would sit hit above it all: a restaurant perched 265 feet in the air atop the abandoned SkyVue columns.

Instead of tearing down the notorious “pillars of sadness,” Applebaum plans to reinforce them, add a third support column and turn the remnants of one of Vegas’ most recent failures into the resort’s crown jewel, according to the plans.

Even the grand vision has already been scaled back.

Applebaum initially proposed a 874-room resort but was forced to shave roughly 60 off the tower to satisfy the Federal Aviation Administration.

The developer’s land-use representative, Nancy Amundsen, told commissioners Wednesday that the revised project has since received FAA approval.

Amundsen also said she had spoken repeatedly with MGM Resorts, which operates Mandalay Bay across the street, about the long neglected eyesore next door.

MGM’s message was essentially that it wanted to see the property developed or the unfinished columns torn down.

Clark County, naturally, is treating Wednesday’s vote as real progress.

“Moving forward with plans to develop land at the south end of the Las #Vegas Strip,” the county’s official account crowned on X while touting the approval of the necessary permits and reviews.

But VitalVegas isn’t alone in having heard this song before.

Las Vegas is littered with dazzling renderings of resorts that never made it past the PowerPoint stage. Financing, additional permits and actual construction still stand between Applebaum’s glowing red dream and reality.

Whether the heart beats to life — or merely becomes the SkyVue pillars’ newest roommate in Strip purgatory — is anyone’s bet.

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