Visit the Vegas that Never Happened: A Look Back at Projects that Fizzled

Sept. 09–After waking up in your suite at the Titanic, a giant resort shaped like infamous ocean liner, you take a cab to the space-themed Moon hotel-casino on your way to an afternoon of motocross riding and wakeboarding at Vegas Extreme amusement park.

Along the way you pass Parabounce Vegas, where people are playing an airborne version of bumper cars in which they bounce off of each other while strapped to huge helium balloons. Those who float high enough can catch a glimpse of a replica of the Golden Gate Bridge outside a San Francisco-themed casino.

Welcome to the Vegas that never happened.

The city’s history is peppered with attractions that existed only on paper and vanished not long after being floated. Here are some of them:

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Crown Las Vegas

Texas businessman Chris Milam had big dreams — build an 1,888-foot tower, the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere, on the vacant site adjacent to what is now SLS Las Vegas. The tower would have been the centerpiece of a $5 billion, 5,000-room resort. But the money never materialized, and Milam’s character took a hit when the city of Henderson sued him for fraud over a stadium proposal he had pitched. As part of a settlement in the suit, the city banned Milam from working on future developments in Henderson.

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Vegas Extreme

Australian entrepreneur Josh Kearney’s $50 million amusement park would have featured a white sand beach, wave machines and a 7-acre lake for jet skiing, wakeboarding and more. Kearney also enivisioned a dirt track for motorcycling and BMX cycling, and 60 hotel rooms made of repurposed shipping containers. An on-site organic vegetable garden would have supplied food to patrons.

Eighty percent of the park’s energy needs would have been provided by solar panels and wind turbines.

“I’m a big dreamer,” Kearney said when announcing the project in 2013.

The project remains in dream phase.

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City-themed

Had things gone differently, the Fountainbleu site would have housed a resort kind of like New York New York but based on London. The developers, Turnberry Associates, envisioned replicas of Big Ben and the Tower Bridge as part of a 44-story 2,047-room hotel.

South of the site, casino developer Phil Ruffin proposed replacing the New Frontier, which he owned at the time, with a San Francisco-themed resort called City by the Bay. The New Frontier is gone, having been imploded, but the site is still empty.

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Desert Kingdom

Proposed in the early 1990s, Desert Kingdom was a $750 million theme part, casino and hotel complex featuring a 3,500-room hotel, a 135,000-square-foot casino south of the old Desert Inn.

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SkyVue

The race was on: Which observation wheel would be finished first? Construction crews broke ground on both the High Roller wheel in the Linq complex and the SkyVue project across from Mandalay Bay began in 2011. But after workers completed the support arms for SkyVue, the project stalled while the High Roller took off. SkyVue is still two concrete sticks poking out of the ground, and scaffolding has been removed.

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Titanic

In 1999, two years the movie “Titanic” was released, Las Vegas businessman Bob Stupak announced he was raising money to build a Titanic-themed resort. Stupak’s version would have been more than 400 feet high, more that twice the height of the ship, and would have cost $1.2 billion. Stupak, who had turned Vegas World into a moneymaker and conceived the Stratosphere, sought rezoning of property near Las Vegas Boulevard and Park Paseo, just south of Charleston Boulevard, for the project. But neighbors didn’t like it, and the Las Vegas City Council denied Stupak’s request for rezoning.

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“Star Trek”

Entertainment designer Gary Goddard revealed he submitted a proposal in 1992 to build a full-scale version of the USS Enterprise from “Star Trek” in downtown Las Vegas to help lure tourists away from the Strip. According to lore, downtown developers opted instead to build the Fremont Street Experience. The $150 million Enterprise project, which Goddard said he created as an entry for a contest about how to revitalize downtown, was to be about 1,000 feet long.

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Xanadu

Martin Stern Jr., who designed the International (now Westgate Las Vegas) and original MGM Grand (now Bally’s), incorporated ideas that would prove visionary in his 1,730-room Xanadu resort project. It featured an open atrium, similar to the one at the Luxor, and the first parking garage at a Strip property.

But the Xanadu, which was to be built on the site where the Excalibur now stands, fell apart because of a dispute over infrastructure. Officials wanted developers to pay for installation of a sewer line that developers didn’t believe was needed.

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Parabounce Vegas

Imagine this: 20 people, strapped to 22-foot helium balloons, floating and soaring hundreds of feet in the air in a 100,000-square-foot “bubble dome.”

Think of it as “3-D bumper cars,” said Stephen Meadows, who conceived the project.

That was in 2010. Four years later, the project still hasn’t gotten off of the ground.

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Pop-culture flops

Elvis may be part of Las Vegas’ DNA, but a property themed on the Hunka Hunka Burnin’ Love never came together. Plans called for a $3.1 billion resort just south of Planet Hollywood with a 2,269-room hotel and a 93,000-square-foot casino. But the recession hit, and the company that proposed the project declared bankruptcy in 2010.

Similar projects that fizzled included casinos themed on the WWF, Playboy magazine, the “Addams Family” and “Beverly Hillbillies,” and Harley-Davidson, which featured hotel towers designed to look like exhaust pipes.

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Las Venice

Before his Bellagio fountains became an iconic attraction in Las Vegas, Steve Wynn had an idea for another water feature. This one was a $25 million plan to build a Venic-like series of canals downtown. Amid criticism about the project being an irresponsible use of water — even though the canals were to be filled with recycled wastewater — the plan died out. But Wynn, whose company owned the Golden Nugget at the time, didn’t leave downtown dry in terms of ideas for attractions. He recruited Jon Jerde, the architect who designed the Fremont Street Experience light show canopy.

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Moon

As envisioned by Michael Henderson, a Canadian entrepreneur who co-founded a chain of Lasik eye surgery clinics, Moon was a 10,000-room, $5 billion monolith that would have featured a lunar-themed aquatic center, a shopping complex, a biosphere and moon buggy rides.

Henderson pitched the idea in 2002. Jay Kornmayer, a national gaming lending expert and longtime commercial banking executive, had this to say about the project at the time: “I don’t know if I understand the correlation (between) what he’s spending and what he hopes to make — and I think the investment community is going to come to the same conclusion.”

Investors did just that, and Moon never happened.

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Grandissimo

The brainchild of Jay Sarno, who created Caesars Palace and Circus Circus, Grandissimo was a 6,000-room resort teeming with fountains and waterfalls — sort of like the Mirage, but years before its time. Sarno spent the last years of his life trying to raise money for the project, but the funding never materialized and the proposed resort died with him in 1984.

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