Harrah's New Hotel

Adding second tower doesn't stop Cherokee casino activity

By Bea Quirk

Building a 16-story hotel tower with 324 rooms is never easy, but Harrah's Entertainment and general contractor T.N. Ward Co. faced the daunting task of building a hotel tower that's connected to an existing hotel/conference center while it continues to operate.

Ground was broken on the new $60 million tower in January 2004, with completion expected in May, almost two months ahead of schedule.

The tower is being added to Harrah's Cherokee Casino & Hotel in Cherokee, N.C., owned by the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and managed by Harrah's. The existing 16-story tower is already the tallest building in the state west of Asheville. The first phase of the complex opened in 1997 and was followed by the first hotel tower and conference center in 2002.

"The biggest challenge was opening up an existing building for 16 stories and putting up temporary partitions," said Ted Frazier, senior project manager for Ardmore, Pa.-based Ward Co. "Jack hammers and saws cutting into concrete make a lot of noise. Plus we had to keep everything free from the weather - and we've had our share of wet weather."

No guestrooms were directly affected by the wall destruction. "No guests were in jeopardy," Frazier added.

A casino-hotel complex runs on a different clock than a typical hotel. Andy Jones, project director for Harrah's, said, "Casino people don't come back to their rooms early, and they don't get up early."

As a result, construction doesn't begin until after 8 a.m. but continues as late as 9 p.m. It continues seven days a week.

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There are also no downtimes in the restaurants or other services. "It's a 24-hour operation," Jones said. The hotel is often fully occupied.

The new tower sits at a right angle to the existing one. The two structures are co-joined through the elevator core and share a common lobby. When the first tower was built, it was constructed in such a way as to easily add two additional towers.

Hnedak Bobo Group of Memphis is the project architect.

The first tower was built according to the Southern Building Code. Since then, North Carolina has adopted the International Building Code. The biggest challenge caused by this change was in the elevator. The IBC requires a 12-in. expansion joint between the new building and the core, while the former code did not.

An additional generator, boiler and chiller were built, but all utility systems in each tower - such as water, electrical, sewer, phone, fire alarm, heating/AC and sprinkler - have been tied together to form one system for the entire hotel.

"It is always easier to build a stand-alone system than to expand an existing one," Jones said. "But this is an active hotel, and it didn't make sense to have two systems trying to talk to each other."

In expanding this existing system, the project teams strived to keep any downtime to a minimum and only turn off systems when it would cause the least inconvenience. Some systems, such as laundry, could never be shut down.

To connect the water systems, the existing one had to be shut down completely, but it was done in the middle of the night. Guests received letters warning them about it, but, Jones said, "We had to turn it back on as quickly as we could, so we used 30 people for what is usually a 10- to 15-man job."

Electrical power was shut down during the day because "we needed the sun to help us out," Jones said. Then there was the sewer system. "That was especially fun," Jones added. "Let's just say we had to do it live and leave it at that."

Jones is on the site daily to work with the general contractor's project manager and field supervisors, coordinate utility shutdowns with the hotel management and develop contingency plans.

Although Cherokee is located in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina, the construction site was tight, similar to an urban environment. To address that, Harrah's purchased and demolished an adjacent restaurant and two hotels to create a laydown area for construction trailers, parking and storage.

Between 25-30 subcontractors and as many as 220 workers are onsite, many of them from outside the area. "Cherokee is a small rural area, and there are few local tradesmen," Frazier said. "Many of them are living in cabins and motels during construction, and that's good for the local economy." Harrah's is also the largest employer in western North Carolina.

Harrah's and Ward have worked together on similar projects before, primarily in Atlantic City. "The individuals on each project are different but there's a comfort zone," Frazier said. "They put their top people on projects. We'd go anywhere for Harrah's."