ML - Vegas Magazine

Vegas - 2015 - Issue 4 - Summer - Art of the City - J.K. Russ

Vegas Magazine - Niche Media - There is a place beyond the crowds, beyond the ropes, where dreams are realized and success is celebrated. You are invited.

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IF YOU WERE THERE ON New Year's Eve week- end of 2010, you remember it well. If not, you may have f ibbed about your at tenda nce for bragg ing rights. After all, revelers spent 72 hours part ying in close proximity to John Mayer, A-Rod, K irsten Dunst, Mark Wahlberg, and Beyoncé. When the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas debuted, with Sin City deep in the trough of a debilitating real estate crash, people said it would be the last casino opening for a while. That proved untrue. But it was the last casino opening of a certain type—the type where Blake Lively dances on a banquette, Aziz Ansari takes a turn as DJ, Kaskade logs an eight-hour set, and the booze f lows as freely as water in the Bellagio fountains. Comped g uest s occupied t he Cosmopol it a n's rooms and suites; Jay Z and Coldplay provided live entertainment; food for the weekend was an unbri- dled, gut-busting dine around. On New Year's Eve, the beluga caviar was served from hubcap-size tins. After the final tray of toast points was emptied, chef José Andrés (whose Jaleo and China Poblano saw their openings) loaded the meaty part of his fist with a fat dollop of caviar and held it up to the crowd as if calling for a toast—and ignited a fish egg free-for- all. "Remember that party?" asks the resort's chief marketing officer, Lisa Marchese. "It dripped with celebrities—none of whom were paid to attend—and everyone wanted to be there. We knew we would not succeed by taking the middle of the road. Right from the start, we had a swing-for-the-fences mentality." Later that night, when Kanye West joined Jay Z onstage and implored the crowd to shake their dia- monds, you got the feeling that half the room was actually complying. Clearly in the swing of things, Sean "P. Diddy" Combs stepped up after the show and bought a bottle of Cîroc for every table in Marquee. This place felt different, and acted different, from the hotel casinos that Las Vegas was used to—from the columns spewing video art near the front desk to a television ad campaign kinky enough to make Don Draper squirm. The vibe was loose and invit- ing. "We intentionally kept our service in line with the hardware of the building," says Simon Pettigrew, senior vice president of hotel operations, who was shocked shortly after taking his post in 2013 to see one of h is desk clerk s ba r iton i ng a cha ndel ier - rattling rendition of "Happy Birthday" to a customer. "It's about people bringing their personalities. We encourage coloring outside the lines." BusinessWeek may have ca lled t he st a r- crossed condo bu i ld i ng – t u r ned – hotel ca si no t he "most expensive debacle in [Las Vegas] for a single lender," but the place turned out to be the most interesting, innovative, youth-quaking enterprise on the Vegas Strip. It may have seemed as if Deutsche Bank—which financed it as a condominium tower (and got buried to the tune of an impossible-to-recoup $4.3 billion) and later as a casino—got stuck owning a gaming business it never wanted. But perhaps that allowed t he kind of unprecedented experimentation that made the brand what it is today. In came high-risk retailers, cigarette machines that dispensed art, and a 3,200 -seat performance space modeled after an abandoned glass factory, to name just a few innova- the GRANDEST SOCIAL EXPERIMENT THE MOST RADICALLY INNOVATIVE HOTEL CASINO TO OPEN IN RECENT MEMORY, THE COSMOPOLITAN OF LAS VEGAS HAS NEW OWNERS AND A NEW LEADER, BUT THAT MAY JUST MEAN THE PARTY IS ABOUT TO GET BETTER. BY MICHAEL KAPLAN PHOTOGRAPHY BY THOMAS HART SHELBY 86 VEGASMAGAZINE.COM

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