A 6,145-day journey from Fontainebleau in Las Vegas to opening night
The Fontainebleau Las Vegas project broke ground in February 2007. That was a long time ago and Frontier is still operating across the street. The owners, led by Jeffrey Soffer, plan to open it in October 2009 as a sister property to the Miami resort.
Instead, Nevada’s proposed tallest inhabited building has sat vacant for 16 years. The project changed hands, changed names, went bankrupt, started, stopped, started, stopped, and then resumed in its final stages.
At midnight Thursday, the Fontainebleau Hotel will open to the public as the Las Vegas Strip's newest casino resort. Here's the crazy story of how it got there.
QUICK BLUE
The Thunderbird Hotel and Casino was dedicated in 1948 and construction began in 2007. Thunderbird was later renamed Silverbird, then El Rancho, and closed in 1992.
However, after 1928, 2007 was the worst year for construction starts in American history. A year later, when the U.S. housing bubble burst, the world plunged into the Great Recession.
If you believe such a thing, it will be a bad sign. In August 2007, a construction worker fell 30 feet to his death. A few days later, a concrete slab collapsed in the garage, causing the two floors below to collapse.
Despite this, the hotel's 68-story tower was completed on November 14, 2008.
Then the project's luck "really" ran out. Fontainebleau's lenders, Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase, were so uneasy about the economic outlook that they canceled $770 million in financing in 2009.
The $2.8 billion project went bankrupt.
Unfinished tasks
The crane is parked on the roof. Eventually they were removed entirely. Luxurious furnishings purchased for the Fontainebleau hotel's 3,644 rooms were sold to The Plaza hotel in downtown and the Buffalo Bill's hotel in Primm.
For most of 2009 to 2017, the building was only 70% complete, becoming an unwelcome and humiliating monument to economic devastation.
However, billionaire investor Carl Icahn only sees economic opportunity. He bought the building for $150 million at a bankruptcy auction in 2010 and did nothing for seven years. In 2017, he sold it to real estate developer Steven Witkoff and an investment firm called New Valley for $600 million, four times what he paid.
That's why he's Carl Icahn.
Suffering from disaster
Witkoff began renovating the unfinished casino resort and renamed it the Drew Hotel in Las Vegas in honor of his son, Andrew Witkoff, who died of a drug overdose in 2011 .
In February 2018, Marriott International was appointed to manage and operate the Drew Hotels division. A new opening date for the project has been set for early 2022.
In March 2018, an intruder started the first of two fires at the site, causing $10 million in damage. The second, smaller fire occurred in July this year.
The opening has been postponed to the second quarter of 2022. But in March 2020, construction came to a halt again as the COVID-19 pandemic forced Las Vegas businesses to close. At the time, Witkoff was on the verge of securing a $2 billion construction loan that never materialized.
History begins to repeat itself. And then it "really" happened again.
COMPLETE Loop
Surprisingly, Soffer reacquired the project in 2021 for $650 million through his company, Fontainebleau Development, in partnership with Koch Real Estate Investments. They agreed to assume Witkoff's debt to avoid foreclosure, and the project returned to its original plan.
Marriott mysteriously pulled out of the deal, but the Fontainebleau project moved forward with a relatively small $50 million investment from the hotel giant.
Fontainebleau's current full price is $3.7 billion, making it the second most expensive resort ever developed in Las Vegas, behind only the $4.3 billion Resorts World.
“Welcome to the Fontainebleau era in Las Vegas,” Soffer said at Wednesday’s invitation-only ribbon cutting. “Today, we open our doors to the world and welcome our first guests to experience the pinnacle of luxury hospitality.”
What took you so long?
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Source: www.casino.org
