Various things reflected in the erstwhile Harmon Hotel building in Las Vegas, at the corner of Las Vegas Blvd. and Harmon Avenue. It was supposed to be the most exclusive, ultra-luxury piece of the multi-gazillion-dollar CityCenter development, but the building turned out to have major construction defects, and never opened to the public. At the time I took these photos, the building had been "completed" as an empty shell, just half its original design height. Engineers soon concluded there was no practical way to complete a 49-story building if contractors had saved time and money on the first fifteen floors by not doing the rebar properly, and the building was bound to fall down in the next earthquake, and it had to go. People sort of assumed a traditional Vegas-style grand implosion was in the works, but the whole situation was deeply embarrassing for everyone involved and they elected to discreetly take it apart piece by piece instead and then never speak of it again. A decade later it's still just an unmarked, unused foundation on a street corner between casinos, as if building anything else there would somehow attract the same bad mojo.
