Out With The Old, In With The New

Usually, most cities look to revitalize their blighted down towns with new development but the city of Las Vegas has chosen a new approach. To build a new downtown right next to the decaying one creating a new "center city" that underscores the extravagance that Las Vegas is known for.

In April, the city formally inaugurated a new urban core on a 61-acre undeveloped parcel of land (a portion of which was formerly occupied by the Boardwalk Hotel and Casino, the Bellagio hotel employee parking lot and other stand alone commercial structures) for the new city center which is to be a 16,797,000 square foot mixed use project currently under construction by MGM Mirage on the Las Vegas strip. Though much of this land was fallow brownfield, its acquisition entailed numerous legal fights over the years and use of eminent domain.

Unlike most other themed resorts along the strip, the city center has been designed to include multiple highrise structures incorporated with contemporary urban design. The master plan designed by Ehrenkrantz Eckstut and Kuhn Architects, seeks to make this a pretty self sufficient mini city composed of its own fire station, an on-site power plant for reclaiming water, approximately 2, 670 condo and condo-hotel units and almost 5,000 hotel rooms distributed over several highrise and mid rise towers, a 400 room hotel and casino, two 400 room hotel boutiques (whatever those are) a 500,000 square foot retail and entertainment district which will house the first grocery store on the strip and an Alzheimer's research center, designed by Frank Gehry.

With a total cost of approximately $11billion, this is the largest privately funded project in the history of the United States and with its focus on art, center city will be host to some of the world's most renowned sculpture artists including Maya Lin, Jenny Holzer, Coosje Van Bruggen and many others.

Now I know that Las Vegas likes to do everything on a grand and ridiculous scale but I think some aspects of this project are unnecessary. Does Vegas need More hotels, condo units and casinos? No they don't. With the economy being what it is now, how many of us will be vacationing in any of those planned units in the near future? Many of the other projects for the city center I think will be more beneficial to the city, like Gehry's proposed Alzheimer's center (hopefully this time he tries to design something that looks like it belongs on earth) but all the highrise hotels are not needed in a city that is already saturated with them. I don't think projects should be proposed on a whim but only if they would be significantly beneficial to its surroundings and the city as a whole. So I would say scrap most of those condo and hotel-condo units, the city doesn't need that many and scrap the casinos cause I don't think they need more in Vegas. Everything else can stay.

Image obtained from www.nytimes.com
For more info, check www.vegastodayandtomorrow.com/citycenter.htm