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Signs of change.
For a visitor to Las Vegas, the recent blossoming of high-rise, residential towers in the general vicinity of The Strip may seem vaguely familiar. The towers might remind them of the places they just came from, where a decade’s worth of urban renewal has probably resulted in a flood of “loft living” options in their own downtowns. City life has been rediscovered.

Las Vegas doesn’t have a downtown in the way that New York City has a downtown, but these new towers do suggest a kind of citified sensibility, and with it a promise: Be close to the action in a way that hasn’t been possible before.

Clearly, something new is underway in the city that never sleeps. Is it undergoing yet another transformation, the visitor might wonder?

“Las Vegas is coming of age,” says Tony Dennis, Executive Vice President of the Residential Division of CityCenter, the new, high-density, mixed-use development being built by MGM MIRAGE. “Las Vegas is maturing, not just as a place to visit, but as a place to enjoy the vacation lifestyle at home. MGM MIRAGE is the harbinger of this change.”

A city-within-a-city.
To appreciate what’s going on at its most grandiose, a short tour will have to suffice. First stop: Las Vegas Boulevard south of Bellagio. From this vantage point, you can survey the brisk-paced construction on a site that’s massive, even by Las Vegas’s super-sized standards: the hardhat zone covers 76 acres. A few visual clues identify it as the location of a place known as CityCenter.

To understand precisely what CityCenter is, stroll to the second stop on your tour (after first having called ahead to make an appointment): The CityCenter Residential Sales Pavilion, a striking modernist building of glass and metal located at Rue de Monte Carlo and The Strip. Opening early January 2007, this is the place that introduces the public to CityCenter.

Here’s what you’ll learn: MGM MIRAGE, the world’s premier developer of luxury resort casinos, is creating something downright audacious: nothing less than a city-within-a-city that will reshape the Las Vegas skyline.

Located on 1,100 feet of frontage on the Las Vegas Strip adjacent to Bellagio, the $7 billion urban resort district is the largest, private development in the United States. Its 18 million square feet of new construction bring together an array of elements designed, in the words of its promotional literature, “to express the best of refined urban living today and tomorrow.”

CityCenter will be an international destination for entertainment, dining, nightlife, retail, art, and design. It will feature a 60-story resort casino designed to set a new standard, a retail and entertainment district showcasing the world’s most sought-after brands, public spaces and amenities enhanced by a $60 million public arts program, two boutique hotels with residential properties, a luxurious condo hotel, and a pair of residential high-rises.