Owners of The Gramercy plan more apartments at Las Vegas complex

In early 2015, the owners of The Gramercy held a Vegas-style party one Sunday morning: Drinks were flowing, and an unfinished condo tower was imploded to cheering onlookers.

The detonated building’s footprint has been vacant since, and now the current owners are eyeing a big expansion for the site.

Lyon Living wants to build a six-story, 294-unit apartment project at The Gramercy, a southwest valley complex on Russell Road just west of the 215 Beltway that features apartments, offices and ground-floor retail space with such tenants as Pinches Tacos, The Cuppa coffee shop and DW Bistro.

Clark County commissioners approved project plans last month.

The new complex is slated to feature a beer garden, “work-from-home lounges” and a resort-style pool with an outdoor LED screen, Kyle Suryan, a senior vice president at Newport Beach, California-based Lyon, said in a statement to the Review-Journal.

Suryan noted the firm is partnering on the project with the LandSpire Group and said they aim to break ground before the year ends. It would cover the site where the imploded condo building stood and some adjacent acreage, records show.

The plans, which come as Las Vegas’s economy remains badly battered by the coronavirus pandemic, mark another chapter for The Gramercy, a suburban mixed-use complex that was once a glaring reminder of Southern Nevada’s wild mid-2000s real estate boom and devastating crash.

Developer Alex Edelstein envisioned ManhattanWest, as the complex was originally called, to feature 600-plus homes, restaurants, offices and a hotel. As the economy soured, he launched a blog called FrothingDeveloper that was “designed to counter the media’s perennially negative spin on the economy and the housing market,” a mid-2008 news release stated.

But the economy only worsened, and funding for ManhattanWest reportedly dried up. Edelstein stopped construction by late 2008, leaving the project untouched for years and surrounded by barbed wire-topped fencing — one of many abandoned construction sites littering Southern Nevada after its frenzied real estate market flamed out.

He sold the unfinished complex to The Krausz Companies and WGH Partners for $20 million in 2013 after spending a reported $170 million on it.

The new owners changed the name to The Gramercy and completed its two apartment buildings and two office buildings. But they decided the condo tower didn’t mesh well and would have cost a hefty sum to bring it up to code, they previously said.

Demolition crews wired the nine-story building with explosives and, in February 2015, at an event offering bloody marys and mimosas to guests a safe distance from the blast site, imploded it.

The owners later sold The Gramercy in phases. The Koll Co. and Estein USA bought its office buildings for $61.75 million in 2017, and Lyon acquired its apartment buildings, vacant land and parking lots for $45.75 million in 2018.

Contact Eli Segall at esegall@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0342. Follow @eli_segall on Twitter.