Las Vegas Sun

July 25, 2008

Already, CityCenter’s scale, complexity unparalleled

Vdara tower hint of project’s imposing presence

By Liz Benston

Fri, May 16, 2008 (2 a.m.)

"Topping Out" CityCenter

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Beyond the Sun

For all the stories I’ve written about CityCenter, the largest construction project in the country, nothing could have prepared me for the experience of standing in the middle of it this week.

I felt captured inside a Jetsons-inspired cartoon.

It required me to adjust to a new scale. While Las Vegas miniaturizes landmarks — the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty — the CityCenter skyline towering above the 76-acre site seems larger than life.

The glass skin of the curving hotel called Aria is covered with louvered room shades, resembling so many glittering scales of a giant fish. The porte-cochere looks several stories high and is now a mass of bare girders, sticking out sharply from the building like whale bones. At 7.5 million square feet, Aria is the largest, most complex structure at CityCenter.

I am standing on what will become a traffic circle that will pass the Vdara condominium hotel, a crescent-shaped building made of patterned glass circling in front of the Aria. From the edge of the road, I can look down and see patches of dirt two stories down — the only untouched ground remaining on the site. Soon enough it will be a concrete roadway to thousands of parking stalls underneath the buildings.

North of the traffic circle, a rerouted Harmon Road flyover, supported by girders, passes through the narrow canyon created by the proximity of the hotel and the 1,495-room Vdara, the northernmost building on the site.

That building will tower over the pool area at the neighboring Bellagio, which is entirely hidden from my view. I feel swallowed by the two buildings closest to me — the Vdara condo hotel and the Aria. No other buildings on the Strip are visible save for the squarish Cosmopolitan resort, a dual-tower building that is under construction alongside CityCenter.

Wedging the Vdara close to the Cosmopolitan on the building’s Strip-facing side isn’t as daring as placing it a stone’s throw from an employee parking garage at the rear of the site. It would be tough for a golf cart to slip between them.

If I’m standing in the Grand Canyon of high-rises, then Vdara’s sharp, western-facing edge is the Narrows at Zion National Park. The concentration of high-rises will be its own attraction, much like the volcano at the Mirage and the fountains at the Bellagio.

“That’s what high density is all about,” said a smiling Bobby Baldwin, president and chief executive of CityCenter. Like me, he is squinting as the sun glints off thousands of pieces of angled glass that surround us.

Overlooking the convoluted-looking roadways feeding the rear of the property is a ribbon of suspended concrete for a monorail that will link CityCenter with the Bellagio to the north and the Monte Carlo to the south. The track snakes around the back of Vdara to the front before wending to the side of the hotel, where it curves around the building and disappears behind a sheer wall of glass like an updated, massively scaled ride through Disney’s Tomorrowland.

Thousands of workers swarm over the site on this particular afternoon. Though largely unseen, they can be heard everywhere.

The bleeps of horns and work sirens, the kerchunk of building materials being lifted and put down, the whir of 17 cranes atop the buildings and the hiss of hydraulic systems echo across the construction zone, 24 hours a day.

Tradesmen toil inside towers framed by massive steel girders steadily being cloaked in glass. Only a few workers, standing in the sunlight at the edge of the hotel building, reveal themselves. Co-workers inside are enveloped in darkness as thick as in an underground mine, lighted in places by bare bulbs. Outside the building, dozens of lifts haul men up and down the unfinished floors, offering them spectacular views.

In less than two years, people who have paid hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars, will claim those views as their own.

Discussion: 4 comments so far…

  1. By SPFPAUNIONYES
    5/16/08 at 6:44 a.m.
    Suggest removal

    MGM MIRAGE and Dubai World to Form Long-Term Strategic Relationship

    http://www.spfpalocal7777.org/DubaiWorld...

    Fast Facts: Dubai's Ties

    WASHINGTON — The United Arab Emirates has not had a major terrorist attack. But its largest city, Dubai, is a banking center that is believed to attract funds from groups such as Al Qaeda. Some of Dubai's brushes with terror groups:

    — In 2004, Qari Saifullah Akhtar, a Pakistani suspected of training thousands of Al Qaeda fighters, was arrested in the UAE and turned over to officials in his homeland.

    — In 2002, Emirati authorities arrested and turned over to the United States Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the suspected mastermind of the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, which killed 17 U.S. sailors. UAE officials said he had planned to attack economic targets in the Emirates and inflict high casualties. He was sentenced to death in absentia by a Yemeni court. Al-Nashiri was also suspected of helping direct the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

    — The father of Pakistan's nuclear program, Abdul Qadeer Khan, has acknowledged heading a clandestine group that, with the help of a Dubai company, supplied Pakistani nuclear technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea. The head of U.N.'s nuclear watchdog agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, has said the UAE was among more than 20 countries with a role in the nuclear black market.

    — A 2004 report from the U.S. commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks found 11 Saudi hijackers had traveled to the United States via the airport in Dubai.

    — Usama bin Laden's alleged financial manager, Mustafa Ahmed al-Hisawi, received a Dubai bank transfer of $15,000 two days before the Sept. 11 attacks and then left the UAE for Pakistan, where he was arrested in 2003.

    — Marwan Al-Shehhi, a UAE citizen and one of the Sept. 11 hijackers, received $100,000 via the UAE. Another Sept. 11 hijacker, Fayez Banihammad, also was from the Emirates.

    — About half the $250,000 spent on the Sept. 11 attacks was wired to Al Qaeda terrorists in the United States from Dubai banks, authorities said. Al Qaeda money in Dubai banks also has been linked to the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.

    Source : FOX NEWS

    Disclaimer: The idea of a free press in America is one that we hold in the highest regard. We believe in bringing our site visitors the widest possible array of information that comes to our attention. We have great trust and respect for the American people, and our members, and believe them to be fully-capable of making their own decisions and discerning their own realities. We also do not make any claims to its accuracy and/or are we implying that Dubai or MGM Mirage or its subsidiaries have any ties to any terrorist group.

  2. By SMB
    5/16/08 at 12:19 p.m.
    Suggest removal

    Ok SPFPAUNIONYES? Then what was the point in posting that little tid-bit bellow an article on city-center and MGM Mirage.....?

    next time remove the disclaimer if your trying to make a point or tie some overreaching correlation.

  3. By BillyInLasVegas
    5/19/08 at 10:07 a.m.
    Suggest removal

    SPFPAUNIONYES, why don't you just call MGM-MIRAGE Al-Qaeda while you're at it.

    They're creating tons of jobs (a lot of them union too) for the area directly and indirectly.

    Nice cut and paste job!

  4. By SPFPAUNIONYES
    6/2/08 at 6:31 a.m.
    Suggest removal

    Terrorists could use Super Casinos as a Cover to Channel Funds, Senators say MGM Mirage Fined for Breaching Financial Rules

    GIANT casinos present an “unusual opportunity” for terrorists and criminal gangs to launder money, members of an influential Senate panel have claimed.

    Source: Times Online

    http://www.spfpalocal7777.org/MGMMiragef...

    http://www.spfpalocal7777.org/DubaiWorld...

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Jim Gaffigan

Comedian from TBS series "My Boys." (8 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. Mandalay Bay)