Setting Its Sights on an Urban Jackpot

For all of the architectural antics that have held this town up to both acclaim and derision, the most head-spinning proposal of all is now being floated here.

Las Vegas wants to build itself a real downtown.

Better known for the Strip’s half-size Eiffel Tower, its pyramid, Venetian canals, volcano and Roman statuary, Las Vegas now covets urban legitimacy.

It wants tall office buildings, urban dwellers in swank condominiums, an arts district with residential lofts, a medical research center, a museum, even a sports arena and a performing arts center.

In other words, Las Vegas--long ridiculed as a warped caricature of American culture--now seeks the kinds of conventional cosmopolitan trappings long lacking here.

Las Vegas has never been in a better position to pull it off: The city has acquired 61 vacant acres, last used as a railroad switching yard, smack in the center of the city, sandwiched between the current version of a downtown and the interchange of the valley’s two big freeways.

Years ago, a developer bought the property for a football stadium, but he defaulted on payments, and his lender transferred the land to the city in exchange for property elsewhere.

The city hopes to lure a development so spectacular that it will serve as a catalyst for the rest of the city’s core.

“We’re gonna have a city,” said Mayor Oscar Goodman.

For the most part, downtown now is a tired, threadbare place. A six-story office building now under construction is the first in 25 years. Aside from attorneys’ offices and government buildings--including a new regional justice center--the area is more distinguished by wedding chapels, thrift stores and aging homes.

To breathe new life into downtown, the city is courting developers to build studio apartments and, after some false starts, is seeing the construction of Neonopolis, an entertainment and dining complex on Fremont Street.

City officials also hope to acquire a 1932 post office for a museum and expect that a monorail being designed to serve the Strip will ultimately be extended to Fremont.

But developing the 61-acre project is key to success of the city’s downtown dreams.

Developers from Los Angeles to Miami are awaiting the first cut in competition in which billion-dollar projects are at stake. Among the factors that will determine who gets the nod: the developer’s ability to raise money for construction.

“I couldn’t miss out on this chance,” said Jon Jerde, whose Venice-based firm designed San Diego’s Horton Plaza.

“The problem with Las Vegas is, there’s no there there,” he said. “Its residents are hungry for a core, a center, a communal place where they can come together.”

A competing architect agrees.

“Las Vegas has its casino corridor, but that’s not for its residents,” said Bernardo Fort-Brescia, whose Miami-based firm, Arquitectonica, is developing a 64-acre residential and technology park in Hong Kong. “Las Vegas is now large and sophisticated enough that it demands a focal point, a sense of place for its residents.”

The 61-acre downtown parcel, he said, “is a blank slate on which to create a whole new environment for Las Vegas.”

While the property abuts the west end of Fremont, the center of the city’s historic and now-struggling downtown gambling district, only one of the proposals includes gambling.

It also is the most far-flung proposal, incorporating what would be the world’s tallest building. The conical Millennium Tower would stand 2,200 feet high, atop a base 500 feet in diameter.

It would feature a casino, a hotel, offices, a “sky park” atrium with sports club, condominiums and observation decks. At the top would be wind turbines and photoelectric cells to supply power.

The tower was pitched by Windom Kimsey, a public works architect from nearby Henderson.

“We knew everyone else would try to be practical, but knowing Oscar Goodman--who wants something like the Sydney Opera House to put the city of Las Vegas on the map--and because Las Vegas is known for doing things over the top, we thought, why not be the home of the world’s tallest building?” Kimsey said.

At the other end of the spectrum is a proposal by a Rancho Mirage, Calif., venture capitalist, Dan Peterson, to build a sprawling golf course resort coupled with high-rise residential units and ancillary retail, dining and entertainment uses. His architect, Joel Bergman, designed the Mirage and Paris-Las Vegas hotel casinos in Las Vegas, among others.

“What draws people to Las Vegas is the resorts, but there’s no place now on the Strip where you can play golf, like you can in Palm Desert or Mexico or Hawaii,” he said.

The city may mix and match the proposals and, indeed, some would use only part of the land. One called for an indoor “extreme sports” park featuring snow skiing, a wave pool, a spa and hot springs. Another, by the state’s university system, seeks 20 acres to house schools of medicine, dentistry and pharmacy, as well as a cancer institute, and other developers’ proposals also included that suggestion.

One local partnership proposes a sprawling complex of television studios and film production facilities featuring, among other things, what would be the world’s largest sound stage.

Most of the proposals share many elements: office and residential towers, a sports arena and/or performing arts center, and expansive retail, entertainment and dining opportunities.

One plan, by Mandalay Sports Entertainment of Los Angeles, calls for both a baseball stadium (for its local minor league baseball team, the Dodgers-affiliated Fifty-Ones) and a digital effects studio to serve Hollywood.

Jerde, whose work in Las Vegas includes the four-block-long Fremont Street Experience light canopy and Steve Wynn’s Bellagio, Treasure Island and a new project at the old Desert Inn property, proposes a home furnishings trade center and a million-square-foot convention center. They would be tied in with a 57-acre home- and office-furnishings mart that he already is designing for property abutting the tract to the west. His plan also includes retail, medical, business and residential uses.

Plans by Fort-Brescia’s firm, Arquitectonica, include an ice skating rink.

On the other hand, Simon Property Group Inc. said it would create whatever the city wants, based on having built about 250 major projects, including the Forum Shops at Caesars Palace and the gargantuan, Jerde-designed Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn.

Los Angeles architect Bob Donald hopes his imagination will set him apart: His plans include a museum-art gallery-library constructed as a tilting cube, elevated off the ground by four columns.

“We took into account that this is Las Vegas,” Donald said. “This can’t be an ordinary project.”

Indeed, says Goodman, who sees the development of the 61 acres as his legacy.

“I have an opportunity no other mayor has had. If we blow this,” he said, “shame on me.”