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Las Vegas • An Australian company won't proceed with a project for a 1,100-room hotel-casino on the Las Vegas Strip, company officials announced Thursday.
Crown Resorts Ltd. said it will discontinue its Alon project after reviewing funding alternatives and will consider the possibility of an outright sale of their project, which they described as "shovel-ready" after two years of planning, design and pre-construction work on the site on the northern end of the Strip.
"Today's announcements will maximize value for the benefit of all Crown Resorts shareholders, allowing us to redeploy capital to fund high quality growth projects as well as adopting a number of capital management initiatives," Crown Resorts' Chairman Robert Rankin said in a statement that also announced other changes for the company.
The Alon project was born from a partnership between billionaire Australian hotelier James Packer and former Wynn Las Vegas President Andrew Pascal. Developers submitted plans to county officials in 2015 that showed a resort with two hotel towers, a 126,000-square-foot water feature, a nightclub, a movie theater and a botanical chapel.
At the time, developers predicted they would break ground in early 2016 and open the resort in late 2018.
The project is located on 35 acres across from the Wynn and Encore casinos and is near the Trump hotel, Fashion Show Mall and forthcoming Resorts World development.
It's not the first project to fall through on the prime real estate once occupied by the New Frontier, where Elvis Presley first performed in Las Vegas in 1956. The building was imploded in 2007 to make way for a $5 billion project meant to mimic the Plaza Hotel in New York City.
That hotel never materialized.