Planners give thumbs down to Stratosphere thrill ride

Jeffrey Libby

Friday, Sept. 7, 2001 | 11:24 a.m.

Attorney John T. Moran III asked the crowd to "give homage" to Carl Icahn, the new top administrator at the Stratosphere, and accept his plan to run the world's tallest, fastest thrill ride down the side of a Las Vegas icon, the Stratosphere tower.

Instead, about 100 residents of surrounding neighborhoods, including motel owners, attorneys, Realtors, and an alarm salesman, gave Moran mostly umbrage.

They told the Las Vegas Planning Commission that the 700-foot-high amusement ride would destroy a historic neighborhood on the verge of rebound and ruin Mayor Oscar Goodman's efforts to revitalize the downtown.

The board split 3-2 on the vote, but denied Stratosphere Gaming Corp.'s request for a waiver of planning standards, which are built in part around a desire to revitalize the downtown. The casino will appeal the denial Oct. 17 before the Las Vegas City Council. Commissioners Michael Buckley and Richard Truesdell abstained from the vote.

For Moran, the thrill ride was about keeping the Stratosphere, the largest employer in the area, competitive with nearby Strip casinos, which are in Clark County.

With this ride, he said, "We will be more outrageous than anyone out there today. We will entice thrill seekers from around the world."

It would also pump more money into revitalization efforts, Moran said.

The ride would raise an enclosed car seating about a dozen people 700 feet above Las Vegas Boulevard North, rotate it 90 degrees and then drop it 204 feet. The car would gain a maximum speed of 122 mph before swooping over the boulevard and up a 416-foot steel-truss structure on the opposite side of the Strip.

The thrill ride would be the third for the Stratosphere, joining the High Roller and the Big Shot, which operate 900 feet above the Strip.

But residents of Southridge and other neighborhoods that were built as outlying suburbs in the late 1940s and through the 1950s said that people investing in house paint and small businesses, and people peacefully walking their dogs, are the essential elements of a successful revitalization -- not a noisy $10 ride geared toward tourists.

"I challenge anyone to name 20 of their neighbors," Dayvid Figler, a special public defender and recent downtown resident, said. "And I know their occupations. They're all the occupations the mayor wants to bring downtown. They're artists, musicians, professors, writers. It's a renaissance neighborhood. There's 10 ethnic restaurants. I mean, I walk places. I walk in Las Vegas."

If the ride was built, Figler said, people like him who want to rebuild a community that fell into disrepair in the 1980s would stop moving in.

"You want to turn our neighborhood into Coney Island and I object," Arlene King, a real estate agent and vice-president of the Southridge homeowners association, said.

Planning Commissioner Stephen Quinn, who said he grew up in the neighborhood and has grandparents who still live there, tried to provide perspective to the mostly visceral reaction people had to the 7-foot model on display.

"If you go back in history, take the Eiffel Tower. Everyone hated it. Or the Statue of Liberty. The United States wanted to give it back. So is it (the thrill ride) ugly? Everyone has an opinion," he said.

But if the ride brought an extra $1 million a year to the city, it would be worth it, Quinn said.

Commissioner Byron Goynes also supported the project, chiding the commissioners from the more affluent districts for pontificating from silver slippers and not understanding the needs of the downtown.

"We're in Las Vegas," Goynes said. "I can't believe you're asking specific questions about what type of market they're trying to attract. Everyone comes here."

Like Moran, Goynes said the downtown needed more spectacle to survive.

But Craig Galati, the chairman of the commission, wanted purity.

"The Stratosphere is the icon for the city of Las Vegas," he said. "It's paramount to the Space Needle, representative of the purity of architecture that this city had not seen before it."

He said a thrill ride clutched to its side could threaten its integrity. The thrill ride could threaten the vitality of the recovering neighborhoods.

"And I've said from the very beginning, the key to any downtown revival is housing. It's been proven time and time again in cities across the United States as well as Europe."

Along with Commissioners Laura McSwain and Steven Evans, Galati voted to stop the thrill ride in its tracks.