Eyesores beginning to come down

Dan Kulin

Tuesday, Feb. 28, 2006 | 11:45 a.m.

Demolition is under way on a group of vacant and boarded-up houses in downtown Las Vegas.

Three of the houses, near City Hall along the 300 block of North Sixth Street, were purchased by the city in November 2004, the families living there were forced to move and the houses were boarded up. Neighbors have said a piece of their working-class neighborhood was replaced with blight. Many still living in the area said they would rather see the houses demolished than continue to look at the boarded-up buildings.

The properties are on land envisioned as a City Hall expansion site. Plans for that expansion are on hold while officials consider building a new City Hall on a portion of the 61 acres west of downtown.

Other boarded-up buildings on that block are owned by Tamares Las Vegas Partners, which bought the properties from Barrick Gaming Corp. last summer.

Las Vegas' reborn Mirabelli Community Center reopened its doors last week.

The old building was closed in August and demolished in October. Almost five months and $6.7 million later, the center, near Jones Boulevard and U.S. 95, opened Friday.

The center at 6200 Hargrove Ave. is open 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Friday, and 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.

The 32,000-square-foot facility has classrooms, a gymnasium, a gymnastics center, a weight room, a game room, a dance studio and a teaching kitchen.

The new center sits on the same land where the original center was built in 1964.

Las Vegas spent more than $500,000 to fix the Stacy and Amanda Darling Memorial Tennis Center for a professional tournament this week.

And once the crowds and pros leave the Tennis Channel Open, there still will be more work to do.

To comply with Americans with Disabilities Act guidelines, the city will be redoing handicapped accessible showers. City officials said there was not enough time to address that problem before the tournament. Restroom doors also might require some work to meet ADA standards.

A source said that making improvements to the complex, including all of the work to prepare for the tournament, puts the city in a potentially difficult position in regard to its pending arbitration with the contractor that built the complex. That is because the changes at the complex affect the evidence in the case between the city and Asphalt Products Corp.

City officials claim that the company did inferior work on the tennis center, where cracks appeared on all 23 courts less than two months after the complex opened. Company officials, though, insist all of their work was approved by and inspected by city workers.

And speaking of Asphalt Products, the company narrowly lost out on the bid to build the city's new Centennial Hills Community Center in the northwest valley.

Core Construction, also of Las Vegas, won the contract with a low bid of $39 million.

Asphalt Products was originally shut out of the Centennial Hills project because of the dispute over the quality of the work at the tennis center. But the company successfully appealed the city staff decision to the City Council and was allowed to bid on the project.

The council awarded the contract to Core on Feb. 15, and Asphalt Products did not appeal.

The facility is to be open by the end of 2007.

Dan Kulin can be reached at 229-6436 or at dan@lasvegassun.com.