The Bay 101 Club is an iconic Silicon Valley casino that is clearly visible from the 101 freeway. Local residences have been going there for years to satisfy their gambling addiction and now the City of San Jose gave approval for the owners to relocate the business across the freeway to an area where a hotel now sits. The new card club will be a casino and hotel and in the site of the old Bay 101, it will get torn down and new housing will get put up in its place.
With city planning approvals in hand, owners of San Jose’s Bay 101 card club aren’t wasting any time prepping for construction of a new casino and hotel complex valued at up to $100 million.
Sometime in November, wrecking balls will make make short work of the sprawling, 512-room San Jose Airport Garden Hotel — a 56-year-old landmark on North First Street that Bay 101’s owners bought in 2013. In its place: a roughly 70,000-square-foot card room and seven story, 174-room hotel.
“I think it will do that corner proud,” said Brian Bumb, whose family owns Bay 101. “The first two things that are going there will really enhance the area.”
The new project comes as Bay 101 faces a 2017 lease expiration at its current home at 1801 Bering Drive, a short distance from the new development site. That location is destined to be redeveloped as part of a planned office campus from development firm Peery Arrillaga. The city granted planning permits for the new Bay 101 project earlier this month, said Erik Schoennauer, a development consultant who is working with Bay 101. I first reported on the project two years ago.
The new Bay 101, slated for completion in the fall of 2017, will still have the same number of card tables as the old one (49), but Bumb said: “It’ll be a little different layout and a little more spread out. We are going to try to do a high-end restaurant and capitalize on everything that’s happening on in the North First Street area.”
Bumb said no agreement with a hotel brand has been reached, but said that a deal should be finalized by next May, when construction begins to go vertical. A second approved hotel, which would rise 10 stories and include 150 rooms, would come later. He estimated the total price tag for the first phase at $90 million to $100 million.
The project could eventually also include an office building of up to 250,000 square feet and 12 stories, which would also be built in a later phase, Bumb said.
First things first, though. The San Jose Airport Garden Hotel will close Nov. 7, and then Bumb said he has about 10 days “to get everything out of there: 500 beds, 500 refrigerators, headboards, end tables. There’s just a lot of stuff.” Bumb is working with Habitat for Humanity to try to donate some of the furniture. Demolition should start in earnest in December.
Barry Swenson Builder is the general contractor for the project and Kenneth Rodrigues & Partners Inc. is doing the design.
Bay 101 is one of two major cardrooms in San Jose. The other is Casino M8trix, which opened a glitzy new facility down the street from the new Bay 101 site in 2012.
The cardrooms have not always been popular with San Jose politicians, and attempts to increase the number of card tables have failed. Bay 101 was looking at moving to Milpitas last year, but that plan died when when a Milpitas citizens' group successfully campaigned against a Milpitas ballot measure that would have helped pave the way.
Source: Silicon Valley Business Journal, Nathan Donato-Weinstein
http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2015/09/09/new-home-for-bay-101-demolition-to-start-by-end-of.html
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