Boyd Gaming Corp. has sold a former Las Vegas casino site for nearly $29 million after a homebuilder secured approvals for a new subdivision on the property.
Boyd sold the now-empty former Eastside Cannery plot for $28.8 million to a New York investment firm that simultaneously granted an option to homebuilding giant Lennar Corp. to acquire the spread, according to Clark County property records and state and federal corporate filings.
The sale, which closed Sept. 10, involved a so-called land banker. Typically, such groups acquire land for homebuilders and then sell them plots when they’re ready for construction.
Last month, Clark County commissioners approved Lennar’s plans for a 279-lot housing tract on the roughly 29.5-acre former Eastside Cannery site, along Boulder Highway at Harmon Avenue in the eastern Las Vegas Valley.
Plans call for a community of two-story single-family houses, along with two park areas and a trail.
Overall, the sale closes the book on a hotel-casino that was torn down and imploded less than 20 years after it opened.
It also marked a sharp drop in the sales price: Boyd purchased the land under Eastside Cannery for $45 million early last year, property records show, before it announced plans to demolish the shuttered resort and sell the site for residential use.
Neither Boyd nor Lennar responded to requests for comment.
$250M project
Eastside Cannery featured 300-plus hotel rooms, a 64,000-square-foot casino, several bars and restaurants, a 250-seat entertainment lounge and 20,000 square feet of meeting and ballroom space.
Developer Bill Wortman opened the $250 million project in summer 2008, replacing the 1970s-era Nevada Palace, and his team figured the newly built resort would create excitement on the east side of town.
“There hasn’t been anything new down here for many years,” he said at the time.
Boyd Gaming acquired Eastside Cannery and the Cannery hotel-casino in North Las Vegas from Wortman’s company in 2016 for $230 million in cash.
In March 2020, then-Gov. Steve Sisolak ordered casinos and other businesses in Nevada closed to help contain the coronavirus outbreak. Nevada’s casinos were allowed to reopen in June 2020, but Eastside Cannery never did.
Michelle Rasmusson, Boyd’s chief compliance officer, told Clark County officials in a letter in spring 2024 that the company had “plenty of excess capacity” at its neighboring Sam’s Town hotel-casino on Boulder Highway and that market conditions did not support reopening Eastside Cannery.
‘Join us for our implosion party!’
Boyd ultimately purchased the land under the closed hotel-casino from Wortman for $45 million in early 2025, property records show. The company had been leasing the footprint but declined to say why it bought the land.
Then, in October 2025, Boyd announced plans to demolish Eastside Cannery and sell the site. Work crews had already started tearing it down when, this past February, Boyd said the hotel tower itself would be imploded.
The 16-story building came crashing down at 2 a.m. on March 5.
Las Vegas has a long history of casino implosions, but Eastside Cannery met its demise much sooner than other hotels that were also emptied out, laced with explosives and, in a matter of seconds, reduced to rubble.
In America’s casino capital, hotel implosions are a spectacle: They are often early-morning parties, with fireworks and masses of people gathering to watch and cheer the destruction.
There were no designated public viewing areas for the Eastside Cannery implosion, or any fireworks. But several people were outside at a neighboring RV park to watch the building get toppled, and the Longhorn casino across the street tried to cash in on the event.
“Join us for our implosion party!” its sign out front declared.
Contact Eli Segall at esegall@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0342.
