More on the Vdara Death Ray

I am a very lucky reporter. I know this, that I have a knack for accidentally being in the right places at the right times. And so it was yesterday when I headed over to the Vdara pool to check out the vaunted "death ray" for myself for an AOL News follow-up to the Saturday Review-Journal cover story that has set the Web afire.

As good fortune would have it, I was there right when no less than Bobby Baldwin, CityCenter's CEO and president, was also walking the area with a group of suits and pantsuits examining what it is that Joan Whitely exposed in her R-J piece.

That is, in short, that the position of the glass, concave Vdara tower is producing unbearably hot reflections of the sun onto areas of the pool deck. The hotspot moves from place to place as the Earth rotates, melting things and singeing hair. It's nicknamed the "death ray" and is certain to be a question on "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me" this weekend or my name is Ralph.

So, anyhow, here's Baldwin, in the white shirt and red tie, leading his team as they inspect the ground in various places and then look up, unmistakably, at the side of the building.


Many people think, thanks to the R-J graphic that has been heavily replicated across the Web, that the "death ray" is something you see, that there's a glowing sphere that you can wisely avoid.

It's not so simple. It does move from place to place even during the hour I was there and you don't really know you're in it until you walk through it. Then it is very noticeably hotter. The ground, which I could walk on without sandals, became scorching, and I nearly burned my fingers touching the metal lounge chairs. I am not sure how this fellow here is bearing it, but he's going to have a rude awakening, to be sure. Hard to imagine what it must be like out there when it's 115 degrees out or how it took until late September for visitors to alert the media.

I'm pleased with my AOL piece, which did add something new to the conversation inasmuch as I've obtained letters and emails from 2008 showing that a vendor warned CityCenter officials that their solution to the known problem would be inadequate. Some of that may be the sour grapes of a vendor who didn't get a contract, but that company is the leader and innovator in the field and their warnings, as it happens, turned out to be right.

Also, I got to quote from "Five Hundy By Midnight," although my editors removed the line by Tim Dressen about your organs cooking. They also removed my reference to a hilarious Tweet from @misadventurer noting that it was ironic that the resort that starts with the letters VD would produce a "burning sensation." Oh, well!

Meanwhile, I really loved this particular shot of Vdara. With the inexplicable black background, it certainly does read "death ray."


Run!!!

Murren Is OK With Locals Skipping Aria

One of the quotes that fell out of my 4,100-word L.A. Weekly opus on CityCenter in the editing phase was this from RateVegas.Com owner Hunter Hillegas: "It's almost as though if Jim Murren could have built Aria without a casino, he would have." Murren, of course, is the MGM Mirage CEO.

I asked CityCenter president Bobby Baldwin about that notion and he found it "completely ridiculous."

Baldwin: He has an affinity to making money and he knows he couldn't make any money at CityCenter if he didn't have a powerful casino-resort. So there was never any discussion of having no casino at all in there.

Friess: Right, but you are a gambler. You understand the appeal of gambling.

Baldwin: So does Jim Murren, even though he's not a gambler. ... He knows that the casino component of any casino-resort is the economic driver of its economic results. So he's acutely aware of that.

OK. So Murren knows it's necessary. That's not the same as liking it and most of the company's planned future expansion outside of Las Vegas aims to rebrand MGM Mirage as a hospitality company with non-gaming hotels in Dubai, Egypt, China and elsewhere.

The reason I bring this up is because Jon Ralston asked Murren today about his admission -- boast? -- to me that he'd never been in Encore or Palazzo. Here's that quote to me in its entirety:

I’ve never been in Encore, when did it open up? I’ve never been into Palazzo. It’s not that I don’t care, I just don’t need to go. But I do know – I have nothing against either one of those guys, especially Steve Wynn, I like him a lot. But [CityCenter] is not going to be, for most people, the same as just another resort opening up. I know it won’t.

Now, it's not just that he's saying he's never been in but that he seems proud that he doesn't even know when the last most significant events in his marketplace occurred. That would seem strange in and of itself -- surely the head of Coffee Bean knows when a new Starbucks opens nearby, right? -- but now comes Murren's further explanation of the remark to Ralston in a TV interview for Ralston's "Face To Face" show. According to Ralston's transcript of his interview with Murren, which should air tonight on Las Vegas One, Murren said:

"I live in Summerlin. I have a great community. I coach my kids. I have a lot of restaurants out there. If I didn't work in the resort community, I probably wouldn't come down here much. That was my point. That is my point as a counterpoint to CityCenter. I really believe it is not a casino-hotel. I really would not be upset at all if people never visit Aria that live here. ... ."

Whoa, whoa, WHOA! Baldwin said Aria's casino is the economic engine of the whole she-bang and Murren knows that. But Murren doesn't even care if his neighbors ever see it and, if he didn't have to because he gets millions to do so, he might never bother either! This is not a ringing endorsement of the most significant financial element of your new endeavor, is it?

So let's remove Aria from CityCenter. Without it, you're left with four buildings containing private residences, two of which are also hotels that contain no shows or casinos. And you have a 500,000-square-foot "retail and entertainment district" with some of the most expensive products anyone can sell anywhere in the world, not exactly a locals-friendly shopping experience. Plus a whole lot of terrific art and an oft-mentioned pocket park that Murren recommends as a neat place to sit even though there's no place (yet) to sit. (Note to fellow journos: There is only one pocket park at CityCenter. One. So "pocket parks" is not accurate. Thanks.)

Again, there are lots of elements of CityCenter I love. But it is worrisome when a massive gaming company is being piloted by someone who isn't personally aware of his competition and seems so personally uncomfortable with the heart of his business.

I asked Steve Wynn about this, too. In the old days, it was customary for the casino moguls to walk one another around their properties pre-opening. It was standard for them to attend one another's openings, too. And here's what Wynn replied when told of Murren's statement:

"He didn’t ask me! I’d love to give him a tour. He can have anything he wants. He can go in the back of the house, he can go in the accounting room, he can look at the financial statements. Oh, hell, if he called me up if he wanted to know what the daily operating expenses were, I’d tell him. Absolute open book."

Wynn has walked CityCenter or at least the Crystals, by the way, with his former
protege Bobby Baldwin. No idea what he thought of it, though. His company did this on Sunday...

...though. The Twitterverse lauded Wynn's class but I'm sure MGM Mirage did the same for Encore and Palazzo. And I found the second sentence in that full-page R-J ad a little loaded:

"Most of all we wish the thousands of people that will staff CityCenter a happy and secure future."

Oh, and one more thing. You think maybe if I wore a disguise and pretended to be Murren, Wynn would show me all that stuff, too? Worth a shot, no?

CityCenter Three Ways, So Far

Consistent blogging has been curtailed for the past few weeks by mammoth amount of coverage I've had to prepare in a relatively short period of time about, of course, CityCenter. As I told CEO Jim Murren during our interview last month, I don't know if this thing will save Vegas but it's sure as sugar saved my fourth quarter.

So far, three of my pieces are already up and available. They include two for the newly constituted Portfolio.Com, a 1,300-word profile of CityCenter president Bobby Baldwin and a 900-word piece on the financial woes that preceded these openings. Both are full of fun, new information, such as when Steve Wynn talks about why Baldwin, not Lanni or Murren, ought to have become MGM Mirage CEO. Scour the Web and you're unlikely to find any real profiles of Baldwin, so I'm honored to bring to you a look at one of those figures whose career from WSOP champ to Wynn lieutenant to CityCenter guru threads modern Vegas history in a unique way.

The other is a standard-issue piece overviewing the project and reporting that it's opening for Agence France-Presse. It's fine, nothing special, typical wire-service stuff.

Coming soon: My 4,100-word L.A. Weekly cover story, my LV Weekly column and at least one Sphere.Com story. Don't know if the New York Times is going to want anything or not; they don't seem to have a freelance budget anymore. Hope that changes early next year, but in the meantime I'm thrilled to be making headway in all of these new markets as I'd never written for the LA Weekly or Portfolio before.

Meanwhile, I offer up this sensational dusk view of CityCenter from the 22nd floor of my now-vacant Panorama condo. (Looking to rent? Email me!)

I love this view so much, it's now my phone wallpaper.

Serve Us Up Some Fresh ARIA!

This is why you read this blog.

Way, way back on December 17, you read here the first inkling that the central 4,000-room hotel-casino of CityCenter might come to be known as ARIA. At the time, MGM Mirage Chief of Design and Construction Bobby Baldwin disclosed to me that it was a name the brass loved but that they couldn't wrestle free the trademarks.

Evidently, that logjam was broken sometime in the past seven weeks. As recently as late March, MGM Mirage Chairman and CEO Terry Lanni told me in an interview for The New York Times that we aired on "The Strip" on April 17 that naming the hotel was "one of the most frustrating things" he'd dealt with in his career.

I guess in the three weeks between when I spoke to Lanni and when we posted that interview, the matter was resolved. It's not unprecedented; Steve Wynn bought the name "Mirage" from more than one proprietor in Vegas including from what then became known as the Glass Pool Inn.

As the screenshot of the trademark filing above shows, they got their wish on April 11. Some further digging showed that as of April 15, MGM Mirage took ownership of the Internet domain name AriaVegas.com and AriaLV.Com. On May 1, they grabbed AriaHotelCasino.Com. I spoke today with the owner of AriaLasVegas.com, a Las Vegas man who bought the domain on Sept. 29, 2007. That's pretty prescient timing. He wouldn't discuss it his negotiations right now or how he might have known that it was a name under consideration.

I don't know if that logo above is in any way related to the resort's logo. I doubt it.

I asked Alan Feldman, the MGM spokesman, about the process. Why Aria?

"Interestingly enough, Aria was one of those names that came up early in the process. For a little while, we were focused on creating a new name, a new word. But the thing about Aria was, we kept coming back to it."

Like anything else in Vegas, it'll take some getting used to but is certainly workable. Remember how we scratched our heads at "Love"? Now it fits. Or THEhotel? Oh, wait. That one's still stupid.

My favorite Vegas name? Zumanity. I don't even like the show. I just like the name. What's yours?

How About THEAria?

In an interview just now with MGM Mirage Chief of Design and Construction Bobby Baldwin about other matters, I asked him right at the end if they'd come up with a name for the resort that will be the centerpiece of CityCenter.

Baldwin said no, not yet, but he also noted that they THOUGHT that they had. Then they went to snap up all the trademarks for the name and found it was held by someone else, so gave it up and they're now back to square one.

The name they failed to get?

Aria.

Discuss.