Fontainebleau Vegas was 70% built when the money stopped — it waited a decade

In the mid-2000s Las Vegas high-rise boom, Florida developer Jeff Soffer's Turnberry Associates began building the Fontainebleau Las Vegas: a $2.9 billion resort of roughly 3,700 rooms on the Strip, scheduled to open in autumn 2009. By early 2009 the tower was about 70 percent complete.

The financing broke first. In April 2009 the developers sued their banks, alleging they had wrongfully walked away from financing commitments; the banks cited alleged defaults. Without fresh money the resort could not be finished, and on 9 June 2009 — months before its scheduled opening, in the middle of the financial crisis — the project filed for bankruptcy, a victim of cost overruns, a depressed condominium market and skittish lenders.

The tower became the Strip's monument to the crash: sold to Carl Icahn in 2010 for about $150 million — roughly five cents on the dollar of the original budget — it stood unfinished for years, 68 storeys of bad timing.