7 Craziest Failed Las Vegas Projects

The Las Vegas skyline is already insane. It features a half-scale Alexandre Gustave Eiffel Tower, a tumbler pigeon coaster that screams past the Statue of Liberty’s head, and an Egyptian sphinx 46 feet taller than the tangible one. The Strip just now debuted a globular concert locale wrapped in the world’s largest LED screen, and is nearly to starting line edifice a whale guitar you can buoy log Z's in.

Believe it or not, it could have got been crazier. Here are seven projects that could easily hold materialized if chance went their path …

7. Viva Las Venice

In 1991, downtown Las Vegas had a problem. The Strip was prosperous while it was just aging. Slowly over the previous 30 years, Las Vegas’ tourism had flipped from 80% downtown and 20% on the Strip to the opposite.

Two years before he helped puddle the John Charles Fremont Street Experience canopy a reality, Steve Wynn, the Golden Nugget possessor riding luxuriously on the success of his late opened Mirage, had a really different solution to revitalizing the streets of downtown’s gambling district.

It was to take and put back them with a $25M series of canals, jammed with rentable gondolas and banked past sandy beaches, from South Main Street to South 3rd Street.

Though the waterways would have got used recycled wastewater, the project, dubbed “Las Venice” past the media, faced vocal literary criticism about environmental irresponsibility that ultimately drowned it.

But the idea may hold lived on, at least inwards the mind of Sheldon Adelson, who knocked downward the Las Vegas Sands quintet years later to build The Venetian.

6. Idea Bounced

Parabounce Las Vegas was an attractor that promised to shoulder strap 20 people into 22-foot He balloons, so get off them soaring hundreds of feet inwards the air inwards a 100K square-foot bubble dome.

Think of it as “3-D bumper cars,” said Sir Leslie Stephen Meadows, who conceived the externalize inward 2010 for his company, One Giant Leap.

Or as an amusement common for personal trauma attorneys.

Either way, it never took off.

5. $100M WWF Casino Not 100% WTF

In 1998, the World Wrestling Federation (WWF), today’s World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), purchased the failed Debbie Sir Joshua Reynolds Hotel & Casino, at 305 Convention Center Drive, for $10.6M at auction.

Vincent and Linda McMahon, who co-founded WWF inward 1980, planned to raze the 200-room hotel and build a mammoth, $100M Lord's table to pro wrestling. It would feature article rooms themed after The Rock and other icons of the sport, and boniface fixture wrestling matches in its entertainment showroom.

But the hotel’s footprint wasn’t giving plenty for those dreams. In 2000, the WWF sold the dimension for a $1M profit, never reverting to the idea. The belongings operated as the Hellene Isles Hotel and Casino from 2001 to 2009, so the Clarion Hotel and Casino from 2009 to 2014, and is now a parking lot.

4. Countryland USA Booted

The pilot Thunderbird, which opened on the future tense Las Vegas Strip inwards 1948, became the Silverbird inward 1977, and and so a indorse El Rancho inwards 1982 before closure for salutary 10 years later.

In Nov 1993, an LA-based television production keep company bought the resort for $36.5M, preparation to reformulate and reopen it as El Rancho’s Countryland USA. According to its plans, it would hold featured II 20-story hotel towers that mimicked cowpuncher boots.

The send off never found financial footing. The attribute changed custody twice to a greater extent before the El Rancho’s lowest remaining structure, a 13-story hotel tower, was imploded inwards 2000 past Turnberry Associates, which planned to establish a London-themed resort hotel on the earth that ne'er happened, either.

Today, the secret plan houses the newly opened Fountainebleau.

3. Promising the Moon

Michael Henderson, a Canadian who co-founded Lasik Vision, has been trying to ground his $5B lunar visual sensation in Vegas since he firstly shopped it to investors in 2002.

As proposed, Sun Myung Moon would stand up 735 tall and 650 feet wide. Beneath its come up would boost 4,000 hotel suites. A 300K square-foot upside flooring would be a replica lunar surface where 90-minute walks would cost $500 per pop.

The contrived satellite would sit down atop a three-tiered political platform featuring hundreds of shops, a 10K-seat arena, and a 130K square-foot cassino that would presumptively frolic “Fly Me to the Moon” an frightening lot of times.

Odds are, it will never follow reinforced inwards Las Vegas, though. Its 250-acre footprint, to a greater extent than double the size of CityCenter, is just too massive. According to its owners, Sun Myung Moon is shooting for Dubai now.

2. Titanic Sinks Again

Titanic, which shortly after its 1997 waiver became the highest-grossing moving picture of all time, inspired Bob Stupak to project a themed cassino resort in downtown Vegas.

In 1999, the Vegas cassino fable who opened the Stratosphere iii years earlier, proclaimed plans to build a 280-foot tall re-creation of the ill-starred ocean lining on the land site of his Thunderbird Hotel at Las Vegas Boulevard just now due south of capital of West Virginia Boulevard.

The sham vas was budgeted at $300M-$400M. That’s to a greater extent than the $198M it cost (in today’s dollars) to establish the real McCoy. Stupak’s Titanic would get stood 100 feet taller.

It would experience featured 1,200 hotel “cabins,” including 800 timeshares to assist with its financing. It would experience boasted a parking service department fashioned after Titanic’s rest home port of Southampton, England, and a retail composite shaped ilk an iceberg.

Ultimately, it wasn’t an berg or hubris that sank this Titanic, but the Las Vegas Council.

1. Enterprising Idea

This brings us dorsum to our going point. The Starship Enterprise was another thought proposed for Fremont Street before it settled on the iconic canopy.

Proposed past Landmark Entertainment Group inwards 1992, the installation would have been a full-scale version of “Star Trek’s” USS Enterprise parked in the midsection of a closed-off John C. Fremont Street. At 1,000 feet long, it would have got doubled the sizing of the Strip’s faux Eiffel Tower.

Entertainment intriguer Gary Goddard conceived of the project, winning a contend well-nigh how to revitalize downtown, and for a red-hot second, it looked ready to set in motion as a trusted thing.

The $150M contrive was to include tonality rooms, chambers, decks, and corridors from the TV ship, as swell as rides and restaurants. There would follow no hotel rooms or cassino , however. That’s because it would live full funded past 10 neighboring downtown casino resorts, and they didn’t need the contention — only if the curious tourists it would siphon downtown from the Strip.

Paramount Pictures, which controlled the Star Trek franchise, in agreement(p) to net ball the throw continue inward change for a licensing fee of $5M once it received a putting surface calorie-free from the city of Las Vegas, which governs downtown.

Goddard and a former locomotive engineer at Walt Disney Imagineering drew upwards plans that excited Mayor Jan John Luther Jones Blackhurst and a downtown redevelopment committee. Before the Las Vegas City Council could lay it to a vote, however, Paramount got coldness feet.

According to Goddard, Paramount head up John Rowlands Jaffee worried that the attractor was too a great deal of a take a chance — that if it tanked, it would take the “Star Trek” brand land with it.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Robert Hutchings Goddard told the Hollywood Reporter in 2016. “This thing would ease be in that location today. It would follow bigger and more powerful than ever. It would make been a monument to the world. It would experience been iconic.”