Legal Case to Determine Future CityCenter's Harmon Hotel
This week the New York Times published a feature piece in their Real Estate section about the Harmon Hotel Tower, part of the CityCenter development on the Las Vegas Strip. City Center was built by a partnership between MGM and Dubai World, an investment arm of the government of Dubai.
CityCenter, which occupies an enormous parcel of land toward the south end of the Las Vegas Strip, features seven individual buildings with over seventeen million square feet of space. A tram connects it to nearby MGM properties the Monte Carlo and the Bellagio.
The CityCenter property is visually stunning, with a colorful assortment of architecturally diverse towers rising out of the Nevada desert with the aforementioned tram snaking gracefully through. One big sore thumb in the grand portrait of CityCenter, however, is the Harmon Hotel tower, originally intended as a luxury hotel before the revelation of construction flaws thrust it into limbo in 2008, causing construction to halt at floor twenty-six of what was meant to be a forty-nine story building.
As one might imagine, the cessation of construction and the resulting languishing, empty hotel has also brought on legal action; a trial will begin later this year, according to the Times.
With a price tag of $8.5 billion, CityCenter holds the record for being the most expensive privately-funded construction project ever undertaken in this country. The original construction budget was set at $4 billion before cost overruns more than doubled the price tag. The first wave of openings occurred in December of 2009.
The master concept for the CityCenter development was designed by the architectural firm Ehrenkrantz Eckstut and Kuhn, which has offices in Los Angeles, California, New York City, New York, Washington D.C. and Shanghai. One of their best-known projects is the Hollywood and Highland complex in Los Angeles, a mixed-use entertainment and commercial development that plays host to the Academy Awards.
The Harmon Hotel was designed by the architectural firm of Foster and Partners, and has a blue-tinted glass shell that now serves the empty building as little more than a billboard for the Cirque du Soleil show Zarkana playing at Aria, a fact that rankles Clark County commissioner Chris Giunchigliani.
Giunchigliani told the paper that he wished CityCenter would determine a purpose for Harmon, saying, “It’s like you have this dead space — use it for something. The whole Strip is overbuilt. We overbuilt rooms. We overbuilt everything.”
The fate of the building will ultimately be determined by the upcoming trial, however MGM adamantly lays the blame for the Harmon Hotel situation with the construction firm, Tutor Perini Building Company.
Said Alan M. Feldman, the senior vice-president of media affairs for MGM, “We had a contract with Perini that we would pay them to give us a certain kind of building type — in this case a luxury hotel. They haven’t kept up their end of the contract. It’s a shell of a building that the county says isn’t safe.”
There are some who suspect that if the building does eventually have to come down, it might be a blessing in disguise for MGM, which can then construct whatever they like in its place.
Billy Vassiliadis, who is at the helm of an advertising agency that counts the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority among its clients, told the New York Times, “This gives them a chance to reset. It’s a great space, a premium piece of real estate. They could rebuild it; they could build a different venue.”
In more positive CityCenter news, last month MGM sold 427 luxury condo units in the Veer Towers to an investor for $119 million, suggesting the future of the luxury condo market in Las Vegas may not be as bleak as some had feared in recent years.
