On Thursday, I had to haul out to a warehouse just a bit southwest of the Strip to pick up the items that I had bought at the CityCenter auction earlier on Monday. After I blogged about the auction, a whole load of readers, seeking mid-day distraction, joined and live-blogged the online sale of more than 1,000 lots of furnishings either used or considered but never used at the various CityCenter buildings.
I joined and tweeted the first hour or so, but then I needed to meet up with Amy and head to the celebrity impersonators convention. I did a fun AOL News piece on that and Amy contributed her photo expertise for a photo slideshow. More on that in another post.
Anyhow, for whatever reason I saw this item...
...and thought they might be fun to have. They're "vanity trays" and I didn't pay attention to their dimensions, but they're real leather and there are six of them. Somehow I thought they were big enough to use as trays to bring dinner to the living room. (Please, nobody tell my mom I do that.)
Anyhow, the final price as $27.50 for the six plus taxes and a buyer's premium. It came to about $33, and I had to get to the warehouse to pick them up early Thursday morning.
That turned out to be fun. I got a look-see at some of the other stuff that was auctioned and waiting for retrieval by new owners:
It was explained to me at the warehouse that a lot of this stuff was bought or sent by vendors for consideration in the interior design of rooms and public spaces at Aria, Vdara, Mandarin Oriental and Veer. Some of the stuff, too, had already been used. Some was damaged, with cracks or missing hardware. I didn't recognize any of these items from anything in real-life CityCenter, but I'm sure they're there somewhere.
The vast majority of items for auction were of a somewhat mundane, un-Vegasy nature. For however long the auction company wastes space on its site housing the catalog, you can find it at this link and some of the items were discussed in the prior blog post on this event.
But one thing that fascinated me were these 7.5-foot-tall Kirin dragons, of which there were four. This was the image from the auction catalog:
According to @EastCoastGamblr, who stuck around and live-tweeted the whole auction, they went for $1,600, among the highest prices paid for a lot. It's unclear if they were sold altogether or individually because many of the same items were batched together despite being listed as separate lots, and the lady running the auction made an off-handed remark to me that the person who bought "them" said they actually only wanted one. (The auction results site is no longer functioning, so I can't check this.)
The auction lady also explained that those dragons cost MGM Resorts $22,000 each. When they arrived, they were made of fiberglass and that was unacceptable to CityCenter brass, who thought they looked and felt cheap, so they never deployed them anywhere. I'm not sure how they didn't know the material they were being made in before they blew some $100,000 on them, but that's her story, anyhow. Here are a couple of closer-up looks I shot in the warehouse:
Anywho, I picked up my little purchase.
I'm not sure what I'll do with them, exactly, although a listener/twitter follower has already claimed one in exchange for a show donation. And we're off to some friends' house today for the Oscar show, so I think I'll put some of my special brownies in one to bring over and then leave the tray there.
That'll leave four, anyhow. Any thoughts, people?
