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CityCenter set to swell Vegas visitor numbers
CityCenter is open. MGM Mirage’s grand project on the Las Vegas Strip welcomed the first guests to its Aria resort and casino in mid-December.
The casino is a 150,000-square-foot facility with 1940 slots and 145 table games, while the 61-storey hotel has just over 4000 rooms. Cirque du Soleil will stage a resident production.
It is hoped that the impact of CityCenter, a joint venture of MGM Mirage and Dubai World’s subsidiary Infinity World Development, will be far greater than the addition of just another casino to the gaming capital.
The 18m square foot complex also includes non-gaming hotels the Mandarin Oriental, Vdara, and The Harmon; the Veer Towers apartment blocks; and Crystals, a retail and entertainment centre. Together, it is hoped they will increase tourism in Las Vegas by five to ten percent during 2010.
The $8.5bn CityCenter complex extending around the site of the old Boardwalk casino was announced five years ago. Much of it was designed by star architectural practices such as those of Cesar Pelli, Daniel Libeskind and Sir Norman Foster, and its backers can point to a list of superlatives such as being the largest privately-owned sustainable development in the world – it has received six Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Gold certifications from the US Green Building Council and is the first Strip resort to generate its own power.
CityCenter has also created some 12,000 new jobs, though it has not been without its share of bad luck. The project was threatened by a brush with bankruptcy earlier this year, and six workers were killed over the course of construction, leading to a walk-out.
