Trailer Station Tomorrow!

I know many listeners and readers are fascinated by those eight-hour casinos that pop up every so often around town, dubbed by R-J gaming scribe Howard Stutz as a "trailer station" because, as depicted here, they sometimes take place in mobile units.

I'll be out tomorrow working on a feature on one, and it occurred to me that this, unlike most trailer stations, would be amazingly easy for tourists to access.

It's at 365 E. Convention Center Drive, at the corner with Paradise and across the street from the Las Vegas Convention Center. That means it's within a few steps of the Las Vegas Monorail, too. They're doing a tent this time, not a trailer, but it's the same concept. They have to do this because Clark County law requires active gambling on a site for 8 hours every 18 months or the property's unrestricted gaming zoning expires.

The downside: The tent will be open for play from 6 am to 2 pm on Wednesday. Someone's getting to bed early!

United Coin will erect a tent with 16 slot machines on behalf of the Marriott gang, which spent $225 million to acquire 14.4 acres in that area in several transactions between 2006 and 2007. The United Coin rep told the gaming commission Marriott wants to build a 3,500-room hotel-casino there, although 14 acres hardly seems like enough for that unless they go Cosmo on us. Also, the only land they don't own is Piero's, so they'd need to buy them out, too, to own the whole block.

I'll Tweet some pix tomorrow. In case you don't recall, here was my New York Times piece from 2008 on the Trailer Station on the old Showboat/Castaways plot. That plot remains as empty as ever.

Here's that blog post, too. I actually won a few pennies that time, too!