Las Vegas’ Hottest Trend: Reinventing The Visitor Experience
By: Larry Olmsted (Forbes Life) October 2014
After a quarter century of trying to confine tourists, Las Vegas is doing an about face and taking it to the streets.
When the Mirage opened in 1989 it was the most expensive casino hotel ever built, and represented the new face of Las Vegas, a model that in years to follow would populate the Strip from Mandalay Bay in the South to the Stratosphere north. The Mirage featured long, tunnel-like, covered moving sidewalks that sucked guests in off the street and into a hotel set deceptively far back from Las Vegas Boulevard. The idea was simple: get them in and keep them in. Caesars Palace took this so far as to have only an entrance and no exit at one end of its huge Forum Shops Mall – once you took a peek you were committed. Bally’s, The Excalibur, and many others opted for this long conveyor belt in a tube methodology.
As the Strip got increasingly congested, there was a concerted effort to get visitors off the street altogether, which took the form of numerous walled off sidewalks and aerial bridges from one casino to the next, done in a fashion that made it impossible to simply walk down Las Vegas Boulevard, the city’s major thoroughfare. To this day, no matter how badly you want to be outside, stroll the Strip and get some fresh air, you can’t – in many spots there is no physical way to move north or south without going into and through a casino.
But things are changing – fast – and for the first time in decades, Las Vegas has realized not everyone wants to be inside. This is not a new idea, as Old Downtown was built with casinos that actually opened onto the sidewalks, often with a complete absence of doors, just big wide portals spilling onto the street. The rebirth of this part of town as the pedestrianized Fremont Street Experience in 1994 was the nascent beginning of the current trend, offering visitors an entertaining stroll, but it took many years to work out the kinks and get traction. Today, in addition to the multi-media light show on the Fremont Street canopy, stages are set up and bands play regularly. When the D Las Vegas hotel opened on Fremont Street in 2012, it upped the ante with a permanent outdoor cocktail bar along its frontage, and a branch of famed Detroit hot dog stand American Coney stuck on its front, open 24/7 with separate direct street access. You can now walk, watch music, eat, drink, shop and thanks to the new Slotzilla, even ride a zip line along Fremont Street without ever setting foot in a casino. Then, this spring, the city got its first outdoor German-style beer garden – complete with real grass – at the intersection of Main Street and Fremont Street in Downtown, which I wrote about here.
Suddenly, Vegas is falling over itself – and investing hundreds of millions of dollars – to get people outside. This new trend is a breath of fresh air.
Earlier this year, Caesars Entertainment’s opened The LINQ, a new $550 million outdoor “entertainment district,” a streetscape full of activities, entertainment, shopping, dining, bars and nightlife, anchored by the High Roller, the world’s tallest observation wheel, a bigger version of the London Eye. The LINQ is a pedestrianized corridor running perpendicular to the Strip, right across from Caesar’s Palace.
Not to be outdone, MGM Resorts is building The Park, a similar outdoor entertainment district anchored by a 20,000 seat stadium, in partnership with AEG, the company that owns the LA Kings hockey team and built the LA Live entertainment complex at the Staples Center in downtown LA. The Park sits between New York New York and Monte Carlo, opens next year, and will tie into major renovations to both casino hotels.
Monte Carlo Plaza opened earlier this year, and basically blew out the front of the Monte Carlo, added several restaurants, a cafe, and ice cream shop, all with outdoor seating. Built in a semicircle around a plaza between the hotel and sidewalk where bands play or entertainers perform, daily from 3 PM till late night, this basically converted the entire front of the large casino resort into an indoor/outdoor experience and gathering place. When I visited last week, people were literally dancing in the streets. The same concept is underway next door at New York New York, which added an open air extension of its Irish pub, Nine Fine Irishmen, opened several stores to the street, and is building an outpost of the Shake Shack burger chain and another restaurant onto the front of the hotel. Along with The Park and Monte Carlo Plaza, this will form a several block long uninterrupted strip of outdoor dining, seating , shopping and entertainment on the Strip. Just one block north of the Monte Carlo, at City Center, MGM Resorts built a large standalone outpost of celebrity chef Bobby Flay’s fast causal concept, Bobby’s Burger Palace, with outdoor seating smack on Las Vegas Boulevard.
I can remember when the Paris Hotel Casino opened in 1999 and its version of a French bistro, Mon Ami Gabi, was big news simply by virtue of being one of the few decent places on the entire Strip where you could eat outside. Now there are many, with lots more on the way, along with many more that have direct access to the outside without entering a casino. This is a paradigm shift for modern Vegas, and it is so widespread that it has even gone back to the roots of the anti-outdoor movement. Previously, the moving sidewalks at the Mirage swept guests off the street and into an indoor cocoon, but now the first thing arriving pedestrians encounter is Rhumbar, a tropical-themed cocktail and cigar bar with a large, extensive outdoor seating area woven into the landscaped tropical flora between the hotel and the sidewalk of Las Vegas Boulevard. It’s a great combination of seclusion and people watching while enjoying the great Vegas weather, and immediately one of my favorite outdoor venues in the city.
Many Vegas visitors go days at a time without seeing the sun, except maybe from the taxi line. Next time you visit, consider going out to eat – literally.
