Today’s Los Angeles Times reports on the plans of actor George Clooney and nightclub developer Rande Gerber to build a $3 billion hotel-casino-condo complex along Harmon Avenue, near the Hard Rock.
This won’t be a resort for the tank top, shorts and fanny-pack crowd that plies the sidewalks of Las Vegas Boulevard to gape at the volcano, pirate ships and lions that are used to lure visitors to the Strip casinos, the newspaper paraphrases Clooney as saying.
“We have this romantic notion of a place where you put on a jacket or a dress to go to dinner,” said Clooney, 44. “We will have some sort of dress code so that it will feel like you are walking into a more formal Las Vegas of a different age or a classic Monte Carlo casino.”
Las Vegas is expected to be the number one travel destination this weekend for Southern Californians despite the record gas prices, according to a news release from the Automobile Club of Southern California. (Registration required to access news release.)
The most popular Labor Day weekend getaways for Southern Californians, according to a survey of the Auto Club’s AAA travel agents, are:
1) Las Vegas 4) San Francisco
2) San Diego 5) Hawaii
3) Mexico
Plans to develop five casinos in upstate New York remain uncertain, reports today’s New York Times.
“The prospect of casinos in the Catskills is certainly not dead. Legislators from both parties have said that they could take up the issue again,” the newspaper writes.
“But the Pataki administration, in withdrawing legislation in April that would have allowed five Indian-run casinos as a way of settling age-old land claims, cited a Supreme Court ruling against the New York Oneidas. State lawyers said that the ruling muddied the legal waters and cast doubt on four of five settlements that the state had spent years negotiating.”
Twelve-year-old Brenda of Lennox, Calif., tells the Los Angeles Times of her special Vegas plans, one that’s sure to raise a few eyebrows.
