I’ve been busy today getting the slot hold occasional paper finished up, so running the risk of CityCenter fatigue, here’s an excerpt from my last LVBP column about, you guessed it, CityCenter:
This might be the most novel thing visitors notice about CityCenter, at first. And its hard to believe that its not by design. One thing that sets CityCenter apart from other resorts on the Strip is that because of the density, you will never be far from the street when you’re in the public spaces. The third-floor pool, for example, faces a parking structure on the west. It’s not close enough to smell the exhaust, but it is in the field of vision of poolside loungers. This is a profoundly different sort of vibe than the usual “desert oasis” feel of most Las Vegas pools, where hotel towers or extensive setbacks remove visitors from traffic and, in a sense, reality
Further down in the article, you’ll note my reference to plural “pocket parks.” When I wrote this I hadn’t seen the entire complex and was under the impression that there were more than one–I thought I heard someone calling the area outside Bar Vdara “one of the pocket parks,” but I either misheard or that was an error. Even though there’s just one, though, it’s still significant.
Of course, if you were Steve Wynn and you wanted to really rain on CityCenter’s parade (which he probably doesn’t) you could just say, “Twenty years before you unmasked Las Vegas’s first pocket park, I built its first pocket rain forest.” You got to say it in the “I’m Steve Wynn” voice, though.