… or soon will be. On Friday, the Las Vegas Convention & Visitors Authority is holding a board meeting at which the future of the venerable hotel-casino will be decided. On the table is a $182.5 million purchase, which values the site at $6.9 million,
less expenses related to closing the Riviera. (I’ll bet Carl Icahn wishes Fontainebleau was in the path of the LVCVA instead.) Considering how advanced the LVCVA’s plans for the site are — including something called a multimodal transportation hub — rejection of the deal seems unlikely. Besides, the LVCVA needs the extra elbow room. It says it is turning away events for lack of space. It plans 750,000 extra feet of convention areas for where the Riviera once stood. The purchase would also take a big chunk of gaming-entitled real estate out of play on the Strip, another sign of Las Vegas’ evolution away from its identity as a gambling town. Who could have foreseen the day when a casino was displaced by a convention center? It’s unfortunate it had to be the Riviera, even if
the property has seen better times. If playing or staying there was on your to-do list, you’d better move its priority status way up. Me, I’ll miss the neon, the Starlite Theater and the white-marbled casino cage. We’ll always be able to pop in a DVD of Casino when we need a Riv fix, but it will never be the same. It was hardly the most state-of-the-art casino on the Strip, but it had charm.
* Moving from one historic property to another, the Westgate Las Vegas is serious about keeping up with the times. It is installing the BeyondTV Wireless Streaming Player in 3,000 guest rooms. Which means you’ll be able to get Netflix and Pandora as part of your Vegas experience. When you go on vacation, your House of Cards subscription goes with you. Westgate claims to be the first hotel in Las Vegas and, as far as I know, they’re right. CEO David Siegel is serious about building a better mousetrap over at the ex-International. The property also boasts two flavors of Internet access: Turbo and Ultra Turbo (15 Mbps), so strap yourself in and prepare to compute.
