December 15, 2023

For 18 years now the Fontainebleau Casino has loomed over the North end of the Las Vegas Strip.  The tallest building in the state seemed to be almost invisible, an utterly lifeless structure cut off from everything around it by a simple chain-link fence.

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The building’s unique-ish shape seems ill defined, and has become a symbol of failure.  Street artists painting murals of the Las Vegas skyline often left the Fontainebleau out of their art, and photographers photoshopped it away for postcards.

I lived less than a mile from it for five years.  I drove an Uber around it for months.  Yet I barely have any memory of seeing the building at all.  I know it was there, but I really have to dig for recollection in a way I don’t have to for other buildings in Las Vegas… even abandoned ones I never stepped foot in.

There is one wall of the Fontainebleau parking garage that definitely isn’t invisible to the residents of Turnberry Place.  But from the street that same wall just makes it look like Turnberry was built in a shadow box.  The wall just becomes some sort of odd background, utterly unremarkable in every way.

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Now that the giant invisible hotel has been completed, we can take in the full horror that now anchors the North Strip.

The interior of the Fontainebleau is an architectural replica of Hillary Clinton’s circulatory system; icy cold, dull, unimaginative, ugly… and did I say cold already?  Well, the Fontainebleau is so cold-looking that it needs to be said twice.

They tried to do a Steve Wynn design without Steve Wynn; and it didn’t work out well.  Where the Wynn and Encore are artistic masterpieces, alive with colors, texture, and rich florals, parasols, and butterflies… the Fontainebleau is bleak, desolate, and hard looking.  Like Superman’s Fortress of Solitude, but colder.

It is just the latest in a long line of utterly forgettable Las Vegas hotels to open:  the Aliante, Resorts World, Aria, Vdara, Lucky Dragon, Durango, and Circa… all fairly new, all unremarkable, one even closed faster than it took to build (Lucky Dragon).  Another has a parking garage more famous than the hotel it serves (the Garage Mahal at Circa)

Gone are the days of buildings that were iconic before they even opened.  The buzz surrounding the construction of the Luxor, New York New York, and the Excalibur made the buildings famous even before they were topped off. 

Sands, Dunes, Flamingo, Rivera, Tropicana… all iconic, all memorable, all famous… it was more like checking into a movie star than a hotel.  The latest crop of billion-dollar properties are more along the lines of checking into a Kardashian… something stupid and ugly that occupies space where actual stars once existed.