Huge nightclub planned for Strip hotel

Gary Thompson

Tuesday, April 7, 1998 | 10:02 a.m.

A Billy Bob's Western nightclub and 5,000-seat arena with daily rodeo events are being added to the mid-market hotel-casino planned for a 39-acre site at the Strip and Sahara Avenue.

Billy Bob Barnett, former owner of the Billy Bob's nightclub in Fort Worth, Texas, is a partner in the planned development. He also owns the Cat's Meow restaurant in New Orleans.

Barnett is teamed up with Barry Schlesinger, president of Heitman Properties Ltd., a developer of the Mall of America retail complex in Bloomington, Minn.

Schlesinger's wife, Doris Keating, is developing the Black Mountain Studios movie-production facility in Henderson.

She said Monday the Las Vegas project will feature a club similar in size to the 100,000-square-foot Fort Worth nightclub, along with 2,000 hotel rooms, a casino and other amenities. The Western-themed project will market to locals and tourists, she said.

The Schlesinger group bought the parcel from Sahara hotel-casino owner William Bennett in January. Neither the purchase price nor the proposed cost of the hotel-casino has been disclosed.

Bennett bought the property from Summa Corp. in 1995 for $40 million. A year later, agents claiming to represent the sultan of Brunei backed out of a $55 million purchase of the land, the last undeveloped parcel of its size on the Strip.

B. Mahlon Brown, a lawyer who served as Nevada's U.S. Attorney from 1977 through 1981, said in January the Schlesinger group is confident financing for the new resort project was available.

If funding and regulatory approvals are obtained, construction could begin as early as this summer, Brown said.

"If you draw a demographic pyramid, everybody's going after the top of the market," he said, referring to new high-end resorts under construction. "We think there's a lot of room to serve the mid-market customer segment."

The new hotel-casino would be bordered on the north by the Stratosphere, on the east by the Sahara and on the south by Circus Circus Las Vegas. All three existing hotel-casino have suffered from a migration of tourists to newer or larger resorts clustered at the south end of the Strip, especially between Spring Mountain Road and Tropicana Avenue.

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