The $12 Billion Mega-Resort That Was Supposed to Replace the Strip — Now It’s Abandoned – HT
There is a 67story tower sitting on the Las Vegas strip right now that cost more to build than the entire GDP of some small nations. At its peak, 3,300 workers showed up every single day to pour concrete, hang glass, and wire the future. Then one morning, the crane stopped. The workers went home.
For over a decade, that tower just stood there empty, unfinished, staring down at the strip like a ghost that did not know it was dead. This is the story of the Fontaine Blow Las Vegas. To understand what was lost, you have to understand what they were trying to build. Not just a casino, not just a hotel, something that would redefine the entire north end of the Las Vegas strip the way the Mirage had redefined the South End back in 1989.
The numbers alone were staggering. 67 stories, 3,889 rooms and suites, a casino floor stretching over 100,000 square ft, 13 restaurants, 11 bars, a nightclub complex that would occupy over 40,000 square ft and was designed to be the largest in the world. a spa, a shopping district, a convention and meeting space that could handle events larger than most convention centers in the country, a pool deck so massive it would have required its own staff of hundreds just to operate on a busy summer weekend.
The design was bold in a way that Vegas hadn’t seen in years. The exterior was wrapped in glass and blue steel, an undulating curtain wall that was supposed to shimmer in the desert sun like something alive. It was meant to evoke the original Fontaine Blow Miami Beach, that legendary art deco jewel on Collins Avenue, but translated into the language of 21st century Vegas.
Bigger, taller, more audacious. The location was prime. 4.8 acres sitting at the north end of the strip, right at the corner of Las Vegas Boulevard and Sahara Avenue. For years, that stretch of the strip had been the neglected stepchild of the boulevard. The Sahara was old and fading. The Riviera was fighting for its life.
The Stardust was already gone. Somebody was going to build something up there that would anchor the north strip and drag foot traffic away from Bellagio and Caesars and Win. The Font and Blow was going to be that something. When the project was announced, the people who covered Las Vegas real estate and hospitality couldn’t stop talking about it.
This wasn’t going to be another MeToo mega resort copying what Steve Win had already done. This was going to be a statement. The kind of statement that would force every other property on the strip to look in the mirror and ask whether they were still relevant. That was the dream. 12 billion dollars worth of dream stacked 67 stories into the desert sky.
And for a while, it looked real enough to touch. To understand how the Fontine Blow came to Las Vegas, you have to understand the family that owned the name. Jeffrey Sawer was born into real estate royalty in South Florida. His father, Donald Sawer, was the developer who built Aventura, Florida, essentially creating an entire city from scratch in the 1970s, planting a masterplanned community on what had been swamp and orange groves north of Miami Beach.
Donald Sawer was the kind of developer who did not just build buildings, he built worlds. And he expected his son to carry that vision forward. Jeff Soffer grew up inside that world. He understood scale the way other people understand arithmetic. Enormous projects were not intimidating to him. They were just the default setting.
In 2005, the Soffer family acquired the Fontaine Blow Miami Beach that storied art deco resort on Collins Avenue that had been hosting presidents, celebrities, and mob bosses since 1954. Frank Sinatra filmed a scene from his movie Tony Rome there. Elvis Presley performed there. The Kennedy family vacation there.
The Fontaine Blow Miami Beach was not just a hotel. It was an American institution, a symbol of post-war glamour and excess. Sulfur renovated the Miami property for over a billion dollars, restoring its grandeur while updating it for a new generation. It was a massive undertaking and it succeeded. The Fontlau Miami Beach became hot again, relevant again, and Jeff Soffer started thinking about what else the name could carry. Las Vegas was the obvious answer.
If the Font andBlow brand could stand for luxury, spectacle, and that particular flavor of seaside glamour that Miami had always done better than anywhere else in America, then why not transplant it to the most spectacle hungry city on the planet. Sofur teamed up with Turnberry Associates, the family development company, and in 2005, they broke ground on what would become the most ambitious hotel project Las Vegas had attempted since Steve Win built the Bellagio in 1998.
The timing felt right. Las Vegas in the mid200s was printing money. The strip was roaring. Room rates were climbing. Convention business was exploding. City Center, MGM’s own mega development just down the boulevard, was under construction and projecting revenues that made Wall Street’s eyes light up.
Nobody in 2005 was thinking about what happens when the music stops. Jeff Soffer was 40 years old when the project launched. He had his family’s reputation, his family’s money, and the most famous hotel name in South Florida to put on a 67story tower in the Nevada desert. He had construction lenders lined up. He had design teams from the best firms in the world.
He had everything a developer needs to build something legendary. What he did not have, though he did not know it yet, was time. Construction started in 2007, and for a while it was the most exciting construction site in a city full of construction sites. At its peak, 3,300 workers showed up every morning on that 4.
8 acre parcel at the north end of the strip. Iron workers, concrete porers, electricians, glazers, plumbers, carpenters. The sheer scale of the workforce was staggering. On any given Tuesday, there were more people building the Fontaine blow than lived in some small Nevada towns. The tower rose fast.
67 stories of concrete and steel climbing out of the desert floor, one floor at a time. The curtain wall went up. The glass went in. From the highway, from the air, you could watch it grow week by week into something genuinely impressive. A jagged blue glass column that caught the light in ways the older strip properties never had.
Inside, the work was equally extraordinary. The casino floor was being fitted with the kind of infrastructure that takes months to install correctly. Miles of wiring, sophisticated ventilation systems, the plumbing and mechanical work alone was a project most contractors would consider a full career. The restaurants were being designed by some of the best hospitality designers in the world.
The nightclub complex was being engineered to handle sound levels and crowd densities that would push the limits of what a building could structurally contain. The pool deck was being designed to feel like a private island dropped onto the roof of a skyscraper. By 2008, the building was nearly complete on the outside, 70% done by some estimates.
Close enough that you could walk the floors and imagine it finished. close enough that the project’s momentum felt unstoppable and then the world fell apart. September of 2008 didn’t just shake the financial system, it atomized it. Lehman Brothers collapsed on September 15th in 2008. The credit markets froze overnight.
Banks that had been tripping over themselves to lend money to ambitious developers 12 months earlier suddenly couldn’t extend a dime. The entire architecture of how large-scale real estate projects got financed crumbled in a matter of weeks. The Fontine Blow had been financed with a combination of equity and construction loans totaling around $2 billion at the time of the collapse.
But a project of this scale required ongoing access to capital. You don’t build a 12 billion resort in one check. You build it in layers, drawing down construction loans as milestones are hit. refinancing, bringing in new partners, keeping the money flowing as the concrete keeps rising. When the credit markets froze, the pipeline froze with it.
Jeff Soffer and Turnberry Associates went looking for solutions. They approached the major casino operators. MGM was in its own crisis with City Center hemorrhaging money down the street. Wind resorts had its hands full. Station casinos was collapsing. Everyone on the strip was fighting for survival. The Fontine Blow needed a casino operator to come in as a partner, someone who knew how to run the gaming floor, who had the relationships and the licensing infrastructure to make the casino itself work.
Without that partner, the building was just a very expensive, very tall hotel with no engine. They approached Boyd Gaming. Boyd was a smart operator with deep strip experience and a conservative balance sheet. Boyd looked at the Fontaine blow, ran the numbers, and made an offer. The negotiations went on for months. There were term sheets.
There were meetings. There was real momentum. And then Boyd walked away. The official reason was that the financial terms couldn’t be reconciled. The real reason was simpler. Boyd’s analysts looked at the debt load on the project, looked at the state of the Las Vegas market, looked at where visitor numbers and room rates were heading, and decided that getting into the font and blow at that moment was a bet they weren’t willing to make.
When Boyd walked, the last real lifeline snapped. The construction lenders, led by a syndicate that included Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, and a consortium of other major financial institutions, had been watching the Boyd negotiations. carefully. When those talks collapsed, the lenders made their own calculations.
The project had drawn down approximately $1.85 billion in construction loans. The building was roughly 2/3 complete. Finishing it would require hundreds of millions more in funding that nobody was willing to provide. In March of 2009, the lenders stopped funding. The cranes stopped moving. The workers went home.
3,300 people who had been showing up every morning to build the future of the Las Vegas strip were handed their last checks and told not to come back. Just like that, it happened that fast. On June 9th, 2009, Fontine Blow Las Vegas LLC filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. It was one of the largest real estate bankruptcies in American history.
The filing laid bare just how catastrophic the situation had become. The project had liabilities of nearly $2 billion. The assets, primarily the unfinished building itself and the land beneath it, were worth considerably less than that given the state of the Las Vegas real estate market. Creditors who had lent money expecting to be repaid from a running profitable luxury resort were now looking at an empty shell standing silent at the corner of Las Vegas Boulevard and Sahara Avenue. The legal battles that followed
were brutal and complicated. Jeff Soffer and Turnberry Associates fought the lenders in court. There were allegations that the banks had agreed to continue funding and then backed out, triggering the collapse. There were counter allegations about mismanagement and missed milestones. The lawyers on all sides were very busy and very well- paid.
The construction lender syndicate, the banks that had put up the money to build the project, eventually took control of the property through the bankruptcy proceedings. They had a 67story mostly finished building in Las Vegas that they had absolutely no interest in operating or completing. They were banks. They wanted their money back.
So, the building sat. Think about what that means. $1.85 billion worth of construction, 67 stories of concrete, steel, and glass, miles of wiring, the infrastructure for 13 restaurants, 11 bars, 100,000 square ft casino floor, a pool deck designed for thousands of people at a time, all of it sitting empty on the most famous street in America.
Workers had walked off the job so fast that some things had been left exactly where they were. Equipment staged for the next phase of construction. Materials waiting to be installed. The building was a fossil of a moment in time, frozen the instant the money stopped flowing. Las Vegas had seen buildings fail before.
The stardust had gone from the world’s biggest hotel to a vacant lot. The desert inn had been imploded. Properties came and went on the strip like the tide, but this was different. This was not an old building at the end of its useful life. This was a new building that had never had a life at all. This was a 67story monument to what happens when ambition meets catastrophe.
The strip drove past it every day. Tourists coming up Las Vegas Boulevard from the airport could not miss it. 67 stories of glass reflecting the desert sun, dark inside, silent. A building-sized reminder that Las Vegas could break a dream as easily as it could make one. And it was going to stay that way for a very long time.
If you drove north on the strip in 2010 or 2012 or 2015, you would see it. You still see it today in photos from that era. The Fontblow Tower stood there fully clad in its blue glass exterior, looking from the outside like a building about to open. People who did not know the story would look up and think, “That place must be incredible inside.” It was so tall. It was so new.
It looked so finished. But it was not. Inside the building was deteriorating. A structure left unfinished and unsealed to the elements does not stay in the condition it was left in. The desert is brutal. Summer temperatures in Las Vegas regularly exceed 115° F.
The thermal expansion and contraction alone does damage over time. Moisture finds its way in. Systems that were not completed never got commissioned. The elevators were incomplete. The mechanical systems had never been run. Some areas of the building had never been properly weatherproofed. Security was a constant problem. An unoccupied 67story building on the strip attracted exactly the kind of attention you would expect.
Trespassers got inside. Urban explorers documented what they found on YouTube and Instagram. Photographs of dark hallways, unfinished rooms, exposed duct work, the eerie silence of a building designed for thousands of people that had never held a single guest. The videos were haunting. You would watch someone walk through what was supposed to be a restaurant space and see the bones of the room, the ceiling framing, the rough electrical, the ghost of something that had been imagined by a team of brilliant
designers and that had never made it past the roughin stage. The bankruptcy proceedings dragged on. The lenders tried to sell the property. They found no buyers willing to pay anywhere near what the construction had cost. The Las Vegas real estate market in 2009, 2010, 2011 was not a market where you sold a distressed luxury mega resort for a premium price.
And so the building sat and sat and sat. Years passed, the recession ended. Las Vegas recovered. New properties opened. The North Strip began to stir back to life. Zel Las Vegas opened in 2014 in the old Sahara building. The stratosphere kept running. Life on the north strip slowly, tentatively returned, but the Fontine Blow just stood there.
67 stories of lost potential, still staring down at the boulevard, waiting for someone to figure out what to do with it. In 2010, the lender consortium finally found a buyer. Carl Icon, the legendary corporate raider and activist investor, had made a career out of buying distressed assets at catastrophic discounts and either fixing them or stripping them.
He paid $150 million for a building that had cost nearly $2 billion to construct. Read that again. $150 million, less than 10 cents on the dollar. For Icon, it was a typically calculated move. He had acquired a massive asset for almost nothing. Now, the question was what to do with it. The answer, it turned out, was nothing. Not immediately, anyway.
Ekon held the property while Las Vegas continued its slow recovery. He made some noises about finding a buyer or a development partner. There were rumors about various casino operators sniffing around the building. Every year or two, a new report would surface about somebody looking at the Fontaine blow, running numbers, considering making a move. Nothing happened.
The problem was the math. Even at the fire sale price Icon had paid, actually finishing and opening the Fontaine blow would require an enormous additional investment. The building needed to be completed. The systems needed to be commissioned. Years of deferred maintenance and environmental damage needed to be remediated.
A casino operator needed to be licensed and operational. Estimates for what it would cost to complete the building ranged widely, but they all had a lot of zeros. Some analysts said half a billion dollars, others said more. When you added Econ’s acquisition cost to the completion cost, you were back to a number that was very hard to justify given where the North Strip stood in the Vegas hospitality market.
In 2017, Icon sold the property to Steven Witco, a real estate developer from New York, for $592 million. Witco announced ambitious plans to complete the project. He rebranded it. The new name was going to be the Drew Las Vegas, named after Witoff’s late son, Andrew. For a moment, it seemed like the building might finally wake up.
Witito brought in new architects, new partners, new energy. There was talk of 2020 as an opening date, then 2021, then just someday, definitely someday. And then the pandemic arrived in March of 2020, and whatever momentum Witco had built evaporated. Construction that had restarted stopped again.
The renamed property sat dark while the entire Las Vegas strip went quiet for the first time in its history. By 2021, Witco was out. The building had devoured another owner. In 2021, a group led by Ko Real Estate Investments, the real estate arm of the private industrial conglomerate controlled by Charles Ko, acquired the building and the associated debt for somewhere north of $600 million.
This time something was different. Ko was not a casino developer. Ko was not a hospitality company. KO was a private industrial empire with the balance sheet to absorb a project that had eaten everyone else alive. They did not need the fonten blow to succeed by next quarter. They did not have shareholders demanding returns on a 12-month horizon.
They brought in a new development team. They recommitted to the original vision. The name Fontaine Blow came back. The blue glass curtain wall, which had survived its years of abandonment better than anyone had a right to expect, was still there. The bones of the building were still fundamentally sound. They spent approximately $2.
2 billion completing what had been left unfinished in 2009. On December 13th, 2023, the Fontine Blow Las Vegas finally opened its doors. 67 stories, 3,600 rooms, a casino floor that stretched across 100,000 square ft. The restaurants opened, the bars opened, the nightclub opened, the pool deck opened.
14 years after the crane stopped moving, after the workers went home, after Carl Icon bought the building for pennies and Steve Witkoff renamed it after his son after the pandemic froze it one more time, the building that was supposed to redefine the North Strip was finally alive. The reviews were strong. The property was genuinely impressive.
The design, which had been conceived in 2005 and then refined through years of ownership changes, was still striking. The blue glass curtain wall that had stared down at the strip for over a decade, while the building sat empty looked exactly as it was always supposed to look when the lights inside were finally on. The casino floor was modern, well-designed, with the kind of operational intelligence that reflected everything the industry had learned in the years since the project was first conceived.
The restaurants were serious. The nightclub was enormous. The rooms were among the best on the North Strip. Was it what Jeff Soffer had originally imagined in 2005? Not exactly. It had been changed too many times, touched by too many hands, shaped by too many bankruptcies and ownership transfers. The soul of a place is partly the story of how it came to be.
And the Fontine Blows story was as complicated and bruising as any in Vegas history, but it was open after everything. It was open. So, what do we make of all of it? Of the 3,300 workers who showed up one morning and never came back. of Jeff Soffer’s vision, which was bold and real and got destroyed by forces that had nothing to do with the quality of what he was trying to build.
Of Carl Icon, who bought a $1.8 billion construction project for $150 million and eventually walked away with a profit. Of Steve Witoff, who tried to honor his son’s memory with a building that would not cooperate. Here’s what I keep coming back to. The Font and Blow Las Vegas is proof of something Las Vegas has always known but rarely says out loud.
The strip is not just a place where individuals make fortunes or lose them. It’s a place where fortunins are transferred. One man’s catastrophe becomes another man’s opportunity. The building does not care who built it or who lost everything trying to finish it. The building just stands there waiting for someone with enough money and enough patience to finally turn the lights on.
Benny Bignyan used to say the house always wins. He was talking about gambling, but he might as well have been talking about real estate, about construction lending, about the long, slow, brutal economics of building something on the Las Vegas strip. Jeff’s offer did not win. He lost his family’s most ambitious project to a financial crisis he did not cause.
To a credit market that turned on him overnight, to the particular cruelty of being 70% done when the money ran out. Carl Iicon won. He bought distress and sold recovery. Coke won. Or at least they completed what others could not. And Las Vegas won. Las Vegas always wins because even when a 12 billion dollar dream collapses into bankruptcy and sits empty for 14 years, the strip just keeps moving.
Other hotels open, other cranes rise. Other dreamers show up with blueprints and borrowed money and the absolute certainty that this time, this project, this tower will be the one that changes everything. The Fontine Blow is open now. The lights are on. The casino floor hums with the sound that casino floors make when they are working.
67 stories of blue glass reflect the desert sunrise every morning and the neon glow every night. And somewhere in Las Vegas right now, somebody is looking at a piece of land and imagining what they are going to build on it. Something bigger than anything that came before. Something that will redefine the strip.
Something that will change everything. That’s how it always starts. And Vegas never forgets.