Toward the end of July, I remember driving past the Fountain Blew, looking up, and asking someone in my car: "Is it me, or does it look like they are taking the place apart?"
My companion looked up, assessed the situation, and said "Yeah, it looks even less complete than it did last month, what's going on?"
I didn't have an answer.
Now I do.
The Fountain Blue, once the most promising project of Las Vegas 3.0, has been completely scrapped. At least for the foreseeable future.
How scrapped is it?
So scrapped that its new owner, Carl Icahn has begun selling the property off piece-by-piece. TVs, computers, beds, dressers, and other furnishings are literally being sold off like they would be at a neighborhood yard sale.
This news comes just a few weeks after the same old man indicated that he had absolutely no plans to complete the Fountain Blew, and that he had simply bought it to flip for a quick buck. Such is the sense of community and pride that exists throughout the Vegas Valley ... the world's largest real estate slot machine.
For further information about this fire sale, allow me to refer you to this article in the New York Post:
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/business/icahn_folds_in_vegas_E1E3777ym7oRHIuxVouaxO
Now, this is bad news for Las Vegas as a whole, but it hits even closer to home for yours truly.
You see, the Fountain Blew was supposed to be a boon for Beverly Green.
What is Beverly Green?
It's my old neighborhood in Las Vegas. Hell, it's not even my "old neighborhood" technically since I still have a rental home there.
For those who are not aware, Beverly Green is the residential neighborhood that begins at Sahara and Paradise Avenues. If you've ever been to the Sahara Monorail station, you've more or less been to Beverly Green. Look across the street past the Starbucks, past the rows of massage parlors, and past the transvestite hookers standing on the corner ... and there it is ... glistening in all of its glory.
As much as I hate Las Vegas as a whole, I have nothing but love for Beverly Green. It was my favorite neighborhood in which to live in Las Vegas, and I mean that with all sincerity. I liked my old neighborhood so much that I was THIS CLOSE to buying a house on Santa Clara Drive, just behind Record City.
That transaction, however, was a debacle unto itself, and some day I may tell the story. Suffice to say that my experience dealing with Las Vegas Real Estate agents (a scummier, scammier, more disgusting, more dishonest, more incompetent group of people I have yet to meet) was yet another small factor in my decision to leave Las Vegas.
Beverly Green is by far the most walkable neighborhood in Las Vegas, and since it is served by the monorail and four major bus lines (including the ACE and DEUCE), it has one of the lowest rates of automobile commuters in the entire Valley. For me, this was a huge attraction.
Even though I only lived in Beverly Green for two years, I quickly became familiar with most of my neighbors. Many of them had lived there for decades, and while they were all quite strange - including a woman hoarder with a mound of trash in her back yard 8' high, and another woman who plastered illegible messages on her truck every morning, I grew to become quite fond of these people. There were very few douchebags on my block, and even fewer piece of shit Californians. I hated everybody else in Vegas, but these people, the people of Beverly Green ... I could tolerate.
Most of the people in the neighborhood were excited about the Fountain Blew, and they anticipated a real neighborhood resurgence when it was completed. They envisioned skyrocketing property values, new businesses nearby, lower joblessness rates, and a revitalization of the North Strip ... which was essentially an extension of The Green itself.
Alas, it does not appear that this day will come soon. It looks as if the North Strip, Beverly Green, Naked City, and the Arts District (collectively known as "Rexville") will be waiting a long, long time for revitalization, and dare I even entertain the notion that it will never happen at all.
I'm sorry to hear of the latest developments at the Fountain Blew. This building literally towers over my old/current-ish neighborhood, and is visible from every north-south street in the area. It's imposing presence is a daily reminder of just what could have been on the North Strip, and like Echelon Place, it will sit for years as a taunting reminder of what will never be.
I think I speak for myself and everyone else in Beverly Green when I offer the following open letter to the current owner of the property.
Dear Mr. Icahn,
Fuck you.
Sincerely,
Everybody
Comments The Fountain Blown
03/10/2010 12:22am by James
5 reasons Las Vegas is now Pyongyang.
1. Unfinished hotel. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryugyong_Hotel
2. Cops that roam at leisure with brute force.
3. Eccentric leaders that think they're gods.
4. Financially crippled.
5. Your status is based upon attractiveness and towing the party lines, instead of knowledge and education.
01/10/2010 6:51am by J.Louise
Great analysis, Rex. Keep the Vegas stories coming! You'll never be totally separated from Las Vegas, that's for sure.
01/10/2010 5:44am by JoninMN
In a new twist in the Fontainebleau Las Vegas bankruptcy case, project owner Jeffrey Soffer has sued himself, sort of.
Soffer's Turnberry West Construction, which is the general contractor on the stalled project, filed a lawsuit in Florida bankruptcy court against Fontainebleau Las Vegas, which Soffer also owns, and various financial institutions seeking permission to move the contractor's $668 million mechanics' liens ahead of any banks' claims on the project's assets.
30/09/2010 4:56am by Mr. Randy Snow
Send him my way for advice.
Quickly please, I'm busy.
29/09/2010 10:43pm by keith
i think that he probably did plan to finish it and open it when he bought it - then he realized that the market won't be making a 6-12 month recovery, that the north strip is in shambles, and the hotel would take about 8-10 years before any return would be seen. he's done some impressive shit in vegas in the past - maybe he doesn;t have the heart to wait it out, literally or figuratively.
yeah, i hate defending him, and yeah, i would have loved to have seen the FB opened in its original iteration. of the vegas 3.0 places, that was the one i was most excited about (and sadly, Echelon was #2. i still miss the Stardust). hell, i would have loved to have seen an Icahn-owned FB open, just to get that area going again.
as for the idea of not buying it - it seemed no one else wanted to. that's how he was able to scoop it up for less than $200 million, a resort that was priced at $3 billion. maybe he can find someone else with a vision and a plan (and isn't fucking named MGM or Harrah's) to buy it and open it.
unfortunately, that will be a long time coming.
29/09/2010 5:44pm by Rex
<i>What would you have had him do Rex? Finishing the project in this economy would have been a collosal waste of money. It would likely have continued to bleed money due to poor occupancy and other issues. Letting it sit unfinished and selling off contents that will be obsolete when the market is more ready for such an offering is the only logical course of action he could take.</i>
Disagree, another logical course of action he could have taken would have been not to buy it.
If he had no plans for the property, let someone who does have plans for it pick it up for pennies on the dollar.
The Fblew sale should have come with a condition that it would be finished in X number of years, similar to the Lady Luck Downtown.
Instead, that old fuck with more money than Jesus continues to play a Monopoly game with Las Vegas.
How much money does one man with saggy balls need?
Greed is killing (killed?) Las Vegas, and this is just another example of how that is happening.
A quick buck at all cost, fuck the city, fuck the neighborhood, fuck the people, fuck it all for the dollar in my pocket.
Greed was all fun and games and cute and when things were flying high, but I think it's starting to dawn on even the most staunch market champions that it's not always a swell thing.
Buying a distressed property with the intent to make it every more distressed is just a shitty thing to do.
29/09/2010 4:03pm by keith
you can say what you want about Icahn, but he is definitely one savvy dude when it comes to getting value out of [most] of his assets.
29/09/2010 1:38pm by John
Trump did the same thing Keith describes in the ‘80’s when building the Taj in AC. Contractors and suppliers got screwed for pennies on the dollar. I would bet that the suppliers of the desk’s, TV’s ect. that are being sold now also got pennies, if anything.
29/09/2010 10:24am by keith
well, it's not so much that Trump wouldn't have finished it, but rather Trump would have had everything removed so it could have been refinished in all gold.
then go through a bankruptcy restructuring.
then reopen as the trumpenbleu to moderate "meh"-ism from all.
then reorganize through the bankruptcy courts once again.
29/09/2010 7:07am by mike_ch
Well, he saved the Stratosphere. It's just that F'N Blue was too much for anyone. Even Donald Trump would not have finished that thing.
29/09/2010 3:02am by keith
he didnt need to finish it right now - he could have closed in the last windows and mothballed it like Ceasars did with their new tower.
i think he is selling the crap that the previous owners wanted to decorate with because he may have a different vision for the place, whether that is his future or someone elses. odds are that if someone else buys it, they would have changed the decor anyway. Icahn might as well sell off the unused stuff for pennies on the dollar and recoup some of the pennies on the dollar he used to buy the place.
i doubt the north strip is doomed - it's just going to take 5-10 years before it has a life again.
29/09/2010 1:03am by Joey
What would you have had him do Rex? Finishing the project in this economy would have been a collosal waste of money. It would likely have continued to bleed money due to poor occupancy and other issues. Letting it sit unfinished and selling off contents that will be obsolete when the market is more ready for such an offering is the only logical course of action he could take. The North Strip is doomed - and it would have still been doomed had F-Bleu been finished.
RSS feed for comments on this page | RSS feed for all comments
Post your comment
You cannot post comments until you have logged in. Login Here.