New hotel-casino planned for Strip

Gary Thompson

Friday, Jan. 16, 1998 | 10:06 a.m.

A highly themed mid-market casino-hotel with more than 2,000 rooms is planned for a 39-acre site at the Strip and Sahara Avenue.

Sahara owner William Bennett sold the 39-acre parcel west of his hotel-casino this week to a group headed by Beverly Hills developer Barry Schlesinger, said attorney Mahlon Brown.

Schlesinger is president of Heitman Properties Ltd., a developer of the Mall of America retail complex in Bloomington, Minn. His wife, Doris Keating, is developer of the Black Mountain Studios movie-production facility in Henderson.

Schlesinger's partners in the Las Vegas project include Billy Bob Barnett, former owner of Billy Bob's Western nightclub in Fort Worth, Texas. Barnett also owns the Cat's Meow restaurant in New Orleans, Brown said.

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.

Brown, who served as Nevada's U.S. Attorney from 1977 through 1981, said the Schlesinger group is aware of Wall Street's wariness about an oversupply of hotel rooms in Las Vegas but remains confident financing for another resort project is available.

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

While he wouldn't disclose the property's theme, Brown said, "It's common with what we see around here. But we may have captured the finest theme available."

Brown said the new project would serve both the local and tourist markets.

"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.