Mandalay Bay
Mandalay Bay is a 43-story luxury resort and casino on the Las Vegas Strip in Paradise, Nevada. It is operated by MGM Resorts International. One of the property's towers operates as the Delano. Mandalay Bay has 24 elevators and a casino of 135,000 square feet. Adjacent to the hotel is the 2,000,000 square feet Mandalay Bay Convention Center and the 12,000-seat Mandalay Bay Events Center; the Mandalay Bay Tram connects the resort to its sister properties and Luxor, all three of which were constructed by Circus Circus Enterprises before its sale to MGM. In 1995, Circus Circus Enterprises bought the Hacienda for $80 million and an adjacent 74-acre site for $73 million, they closed the Hacienda on December 1, 1996, razed it a month on New Year's Eve. Plans for the tropical-themed "Project Paradise" were revealed the same day, with an estimated budget of $800 million to $1 billion. In February 1998 the project was renamed Mandalay Bay to evoke the exotic tropical romanticism of the poem "Mandalay."Problems arose during construction because of excessive and uneven settling of the soil beneath the building.
Rumors about the severity of the issues depressed Circus Circus's stock price. The problem was solved by installing 536 micropiles below the building, at an estimated cost of $8 million to $10 million; the resort opened on March 2, 1999, with grand opening festivities that included the Blues Brothers leading a procession of 200 motorcycles to Mandalay Bay's front doors, a concert by Bob Dylan at the House of Blues. In June 1999, Circus Circus changed its name to Mandalay Resort Group. Construction of a major convention center at Mandalay Bay was begun in June 2001, with its opening set for the summer of 2002. After a delay in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks, the Mandalay Bay Convention Center opened in January 2003. With 1.5 million square feet of space, it was the fifth largest convention center in the nation. On May 23, 2002, the Mandalay Resort Group announced a second 1,122-room hotel tower, with a cost of at least $200 million. Construction began on the project in September 2002.
The name of the tower, THEhotel at Mandalay Bay, was revealed in October 2003. The tower opened on December 17, 2003. In February 2005, Mandalay Resort Group was sold to MGM Mirage, which owns the resort; the acquisition was finalized on April 25, 2005. On October 1, 2017, gunman Stephen Paddock opened fire on the Route 91 Harvest, a country music festival, from a room on the 32nd floor of the hotel, killing 58 and wounding 546; the shooting ended when Paddock committed suicide before Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department officers reached the hotel room. The incident is the deadliest mass shooting by a lone gunman in modern U. S. history. The shooting brought attention to a legal device called a bump-fire stock, used to mimic an automatic weapon. Automatic weapons are restricted by the National Firearms Act of 1934 and the Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986; the gold coloring of the hotel is a result of gold leaf used on the windows. Levels 40-42 are designed as penthouse suites, with a penthouse lounge on level 62 for guests staying in the penthouses.
Level 43 is a restaurant and bar. Five floors of the main hotel building are occupied by the five-star and AAA Five-Diamond Four Seasons Hotel Las Vegas; the resort's second tower, with 45 stories and 1,117 suites operated as THEhotel at Mandalay Bay, now operates as Delano Las Vegas. Each suite is at least 750 square feet. A production of the classic Broadway musical Chicago debuted at Mandalay Bay's 1999 grand opening and ran for one year. Storm, an original production show featuring Latin music, ran from April 2001 to July 2002. Mamma Mia! was a long-running stage production at the resort from 2003 to 2009. The show was replaced with Disney's The Lion King, which opened on May 15, 2009, its run ended in 2011 to make way for Michael Jackson: One, by Cirque du Soleil, which opened May 2013. Another popular attraction is the House of Blues, a venue for live music and a restaurant, with a capacity of 1,800. On the top floor of the hotel is the House of Blues Foundation Room, featuring a dining room, private dining rooms, a balcony looking down the Las Vegas Strip.
Mandalay Beach is an 11-acre pool area with three heated pools, a wave pool with connecting pool for small children, a lazy river that features a small waterfall. The wave machine was designed and manufactured by Scottish Company Murphys Waves Ltd and features 1.6 million gallons of water and waves in 45 to 90 second intervals with heights ranging anywhere from two to four feet. The wave machine can produce surfing waves up to 10ft high but these are only used during special events, it has a strict 48" height requirement. The European-style pool, called Moorea, features its own private bar as well as the allowance of female guests to bathe topless; as a result, Moorea is separated from the rest of the pool by smoked glass windows and an over-21 requirement. There are two restaurants at the Beach; the pool area won the Las Vegas Review Journal's Reader's "Best Pool of Las Vegas" award for seven years in a row. One pool remains open throughout the winter months. In keeping with the resort's tropical theme, it features a saltwa
Park MGM
Park MGM Monte Carlo Resort and Casino, is a megaresort hotel and casino on the Las Vegas Strip in Paradise, United States. The hotel, with a height of 360 ft, has 32 floors, featuring a 102,000-square-foot casino floor with 1,400 slot machines, 60 table games, 15 poker tables, it is operated by MGM Resorts International. The hotel offers 2,992 guest rooms, including 259 luxury suites; the Monte Carlo was converted into Park MGM between late 2016 and 2018, with the upper floors being converted into a boutique hotel, NoMad Las Vegas. The hotel named to invoke the Place du Casino in Monte Carlo, featured chandelier domes, marble floors, neoclassical arches, ornate fountains, gas-lit promenades; as of 2010, Monte Carlo had a AAA-Four-Diamond rating. The original Monte Carlo included 22,000 sq ft of retail stores, plus convention facilities, a spa, fitness center, a hair salon, a 2,000-square-foot exercise room, a pool area, which includes a wave pool lazy river, the Street of Dreams shopping area collection of retail stores which includes Optica, Marshall Rousso, Harley Davidson of Las Vegas and Art of Music.
A 21,000 sq ft pool area includes a wave pool with changing wave patterns, a "Lazy River" feature. The CityCenter Tram offers access to the Bellagio and Crystals retail district in the CityCenter complex, with service every 5 minutes. On October 7, 2010, the JabbaWockeeZ began performance of their residency at Monte Carlo, entitled "MÜS. I. C"; this show was performed five nights per week at the 1,224-seat Monte Carlo Theater, which under its previous name hosted magician Lance Burton, who performed there between June 21, 1996 and September 4, 2010. In 2012, the JabbaWockeeZ show moved to the 800-seat Monte Carlo Pavilion. On October 11, 2015, Blue Man Group discontinued their show at the Monte Carlo and moved back to the Luxor to open a new show, which opened on November 18, 2015. On October 18, 2018, Britney Spears announced a new residency show at the Park MGM opening in February 2019 titled Britney: Domination; as of 2009, the Monte Carlo print advertising campaign featured humorously misspelled French words coupled with glamorous images.
The campaign's tagline was "Unpretentiously luxurious". Park MGM is located on part of the former site of the Dunes golf course. Mirage Resorts purchased the Dunes in 1992 and closed it in January 1993. In May 1994, Mirage and Gold Strike Resorts announced a joint venture to build a $250-million casino targeted at budget-conscious visitors, on 43 acres of the Dunes site. Ground was broken for the hotel in March 1995. Circus Circus Enterprises acquired Gold Strike in June 1995 and took over its role of managing the project. Gold Strike had hoped to name the project as the Grand Victoria, the same name as the casino being developed by the company in Illinois, but that idea was discarded because of potential confusion with the MGM Grand. "Victoria" and "Victoria Bay" were reported as names for the property. Details about the property were revealed in July 1995, including that it would be named the Monte Carlo and feature Belle Époque architecture, based on the Monte Carlo Casino in Monaco; the Monte Carlo opened to the public at midnight on June 21, 1996, following an invitation-only pre-opening celebration, including a fireworks show.
The project cost $344 million to build. On January 25, 2008, at 10:57 AM, a three-alarm fire was reported on the exterior of the top six floors and roof of the casino. Portions of the hotel facade's Exterior Insulation Finishing System burned with some debris falling off and starting smaller secondary fires on ledges three floors below; the fire was contained an hour after it began. It was an exterior fire; the Hotel & Casino reopened to guests on February 15, 2008. MGM Mirage officials put the total losses due to fire damage and loss of business at just under $100 million. Fire investigators interviewed witnesses and investigated the scene, determined the cause of the fire was the improper cutting and welding operations by contractors who were installing a steel catwalk; the 5,200-seat Park Theater at the Monte Carlo was built and opened on December 17, 2016. The theater has had residencies by Ricky Cher; the theater will be holding a 2 year residency by Lady Gaga from 28 December 2018 until further notice called Enigma as well as the first concert residency by Janet Jackson beginning in May 2019 titled Janet Jackson: Metamorphosis.
In June 2016, MGM announced a joint venture with Sydell Group that the Monte Carlo would be renovated and rebranded as the Park MGM, named after the adjacent dining and entertainment district, The Park, that opened in April 2016, the NoMad Hotel would occupy the top floors. It will feature the new Eataly restaurant. Both hotels began construction at the end of 2016, with completion planned for 2018; the property was renamed Park MGM on May 9, 2018. ‘’’Hotel32’’’ was an ultra-luxury, boutique hotel located on Monte Carlo's top floor. The new extension opened on August 10, 2009; the hotel had 50 lofts ranging in size from 850-square-foot studios to 2,000-square-foot penthouses and could only be accessed via a private elevator. All Hotel32 guests had access to a dedicated Suite Assistant, who provides personal butler and concierge services and numerous high-tech touches, including a TV integrated into the bathroom mirror. Guests had access to Lounge32. Nomad Las Vegas offered its guests a branded iPhone at check-in to promote the use of hotel amenities.
The system, running Hotel Evolution software, enabled the
Casino Royale Hotel & Casino
The Best Western Plus Casino Royale is a casino and hotel on the Las Vegas Strip in Paradise, Nevada. The casino caters to low rollers, features low table minimums for roulette and blackjack; the casino until offered 100 times odds on craps at all times. Casino Royale now offers 100 times odds only when offering a $5 minimum bet, offers 20 times odds when offering a $3 minimum bet "at selected dates and times", it is known for its promotional slot play. Timeshare promotions in Las Vegas give out Casino Royale slot play, to be used at specific machines. To date, March 2017, the casino has resisted the Las Vegas Strip trend of adding a resort fee to their daily room charge. Before 1992, this property neighbored the Sands Hotel Casino to the south, contained several motels and casinos: Bill's Place, Bon Aire Motel, Motor Inn Motel, Louigi's Charcoal Broiler, Frank Musso's Restaurant. In the 1960s, a Denny's restaurant and Travelodge were built here. Nob Hill Casino opened between the two in 1978, closing in 1990.
On January 1, 1992 the casino reopened as the Casino Royale with a facade that united the property from the Denny's restaurant on the north side, to the adjacent Travelodge on the south, purchased and used for hotel rooms. In the late 1990s Casino Royale had highest odds allowed in craps; the game was a 50 cent minimum bet game,which allowed a player to place 100 times more in the odd bet. It was not uncommon to see 50 cent bets with $25 to $50 odds bets; this was. The Casino Royale was the first casino property on the Las Vegas Strip to install Geoff Hall's Blackjack variant Blackjack Switch; the success of Blackjack Switch at the Casino Royale lead to the game spreading to many other casinos. In January 2013, the property was rebranded as part of the Best Western hotel chain; the Casino Royale was represented in the 2004 video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas as the Royal Casino. There is a hidden achievement in Project Gotham Racing 4 in which the player must take a picture in front of the Casino Royale while in an Aston Martin DBS.
Official website
Excalibur Hotel and Casino
Excalibur Hotel and Casino is a hotel and casino located on the Las Vegas Strip in Paradise, Nevada, in the United States. It is operated by MGM Resorts International. Excalibur, named for the mythical sword of King Arthur, uses the Medieval theme in several ways, its facade is a stylized image of a castle. Until 2007, a wizard-like figure representing Merlin looked out from a high turret. Excalibur is situated at the Tropicana - Las Vegas Boulevard intersection; the hotel is linked by overhead pedestrian bridges to neighboring casinos to the north and to the east. A free tram connects Excalibur to its sister MGM Resorts International properties to the south and Mandalay Bay; the land on which the Excalibur sits was the proposed site of the Xanadu Resort envisioned in 1975. The 1,730 room Asian-tropical themed resort would have been the first mega resort in Las Vegas; the project was never built when the developers could not secure a deal with the county on the sewer infrastructure such a large project would have required.
Circus Circus Enterprises constructed Excalibur which opened on June 19, 1990, as the largest hotel in the world, with over 4,000 rooms, covering over 70 acres. As of 2016 it is the seventh-largest hotel in Las Vegas, the eleventh-largest hotel worldwide. MGM Resorts International purchased the property in 2005. Excalibur was designed in line with the "theme resort" strategy popular among some casino operators during the 1990s, which included the traditional Las Vegas gaming experience coupled with family-oriented elements. However, since 2006 most of the medieval themed statues and scenery have been removed as part of a four-year renovation and modernization project; as of 2010, few of the themed wall murals still remained as Excalibur was updated to include more modern and understated elements, including contemporary furniture and flat-screen plasma TVs in 2,000 renovated guest rooms. On March 21, 2003, Josh Ford of Los Angeles hit the largest Megabucks Jackpot to date of US$39.7 million at Excalibur.
The 100,000-square-foot gaming area at Excalibur consists of both table games and over 1,200 slot machines. In addition to casino space, the Excalibur resort includes a renovated pool area, a 13,000-square-foot spa and fitness center, eight restaurants and a food court, the Chapel at Excalibur, the Octane Lounge & The Lounge with live music on the weekends, an arcade. Excalibur is home to three permanent shows: the all-male revue Thunder From Down Under, The Australian Bee Gees Show, a tribute to the Bee Gees and the medieval themed dinner show Tournament of Kings. Thunder From Down Under moved to Excalibur in July 2001 and since has received recognition as one of the best all-male strip shows in Las Vegas. In 2006, the performance space was renamed the "Thunder From Down Under Showroom" in honor of the troupe. Tournament of Kings is a medieval jousting tournament performed with 12 breeds of horses and 32 cast members in a 925-seat amphitheater called King Arthur's Arena; the show includes a banquet feast served by a costumed serf or wench and is meant to be eaten without utensils.
Tournament of Kings debuted along with the opening of Excalibur in 1990. Dick's Last Resort restaurant opened at Excalibur in June 2007. Dick's is known for its unusual dining experience in which servers purposefully act obnoxious towards guests. Employee "Taco" is considered Dick's mascot and entertains guests with his own version of the Bellagio fountain show using water dispensers behind the bar. Excalibur's food court housed one of the few McDonald's in the world to vend Pepsi instead of Coke until the restaurant closed in early 2016; the fun dungeon is an arcade from which you can access the Tournament of Kings arena, includes a laser tag arena. Excalibur has been featured in several video game and television productions since opening in 1990. Excalibur itself or a hotel resembling Excalibur makes appearances in the video games Driver 2 and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. In television productions, Excalibur was the setting for a stunt on the Las Vegas edition of Fear Factor and was featured in an episode of South Park called "It Hits the Fan".
Season six of Top Chef contestant Jennifer used Excalibur as the inspiration for one of her meals. Interior Excalibur Hotel and Casino website "Roy Vegas" - photos showing the Dick's Last Resort promotion that replaced Merlin
Caesars Palace
Caesars Palace is a luxury hotel and casino in Paradise, United States. The hotel is situated on the west side of the Las Vegas Strip between The Mirage, it is one of Las Vegas's best known landmarks. Caesars Palace was established in 1966 by Jay Sarno, who sought to create an opulent facility that gave guests a sense of life during the Roman Empire, it contains many statues and iconography typical of Hollywood Roman period productions including a 20-foot statue of Augustus Caesar near the entrance. Caesars Palace is now operated by Caesars Entertainment; as of July 2016, the hotel has 3,976 rooms and suites in six towers and a convention facility of over 300,000 square feet. The hotel has a large range of restaurants. Among them are several which serve authentic Chinese cuisine to cater to wealthy East Asian gamblers. From the outset, Caesars Palace has been oriented towards attracting high rollers; the modern casino facilities include table games such as blackjack, roulette, Spanish 21, mini-baccarat, Pai Gow, Pai Gow poker.
The casino features a 4,500-square-foot 24-hour poker room. The hotel has operated as a host venue for live music and sports entertainment. In addition to holding boxing matches since the late 1970s, Caesars hosted the Caesars Palace Grand Prix from 1981 to 1982. Notable entertainers who have performed at Caesars Palace include Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr. Dean Martin, Rod Stewart, Stevie Nicks, Celine Dion, Shania Twain, Bette Midler, Elton John, Diana Ross, Liza Minnelli, Julio Iglesias, Harry Belafonte, Lena Horne, Judy Garland, Tony Bennett, Gloria Estefan, Mariah Carey, Matt Goss, Deana Martin; the main performance venue is The Colosseum. The theatre contains a 22,450-square-foot stage; the stage was a special construction for Celine Dion's show, A New Day... in 2003. After departing in 2007, Dion returned to the Colosseum with her new show entitled "Celine" on March 15, 2011, under contract through June 9, 2018 for 65 shows per year. In 1962, cabana motel owners Jay Sarno and Stanley Mallin applied for a $10.6 million loan from the Teamsters Central States Pension Fund.
He began plans to build a hotel on land owned by Kirk Kerkorian. Sarno would act as designer of the hotel he planned to construct, his vision was to emulate life under the Roman Empire. The objective of the palace was to ensure an atmosphere in which everybody staying at the hotel would feel like a Caesar. Caesars Palace was instrumental in beginning a new era of lavish casinos from the late 1960s onward. Architectural writer, Alan Hess, stated: "Caesars Palace needed only a sumptuous array of Classical statuary and a host of marble-white columns to establish its theme; the visitor's imagination, in league with well-placed publicity, filled in the opulence". Jefferson Graham wrote that the result was "the gaudiest, most elaborate, most talked about resort Vegas had seen. Emblem was a chesty female dipping grapes into the waiting mouth of a recumbent Roman, fitted out in toga, laurel wreath, phallic dagger"; the inauguration ceremony was held on August 5, 1966. Sarno and his partner, Nate Jacobsen, spent one million dollars on the event.
The cost included "the largest order of Ukrainian caviar placed by a private organization", two tons of filet mignon, 300 pounds of Maryland crabmeat and 50,000 glasses of champagne. Cocktail waitresses in Greco-Roman wigs would greet guests and say "Welcome to Caesars Palace, I am your slave". Among the performers at the opening were Andy Williams and Phil Richards. According to author Ovid Demaris, Caesars Palace was "a mob-controlled casino from the day it opened its doors". By the time it opened, the significant publicity of the new hotel had generated $42 million in advanced bookings. On December 31, 1967, stunt performer Evel Knievel arrived at the hotel to watch a boxing match and convinced Sarno that he could jump over the distance of 140 feet over the fountains. ABC came in to film the jump, in which Knievel hit the top of the safety ramp after the jump and flew over his handlebars into the parking lot of neighbouring Dunes. Fracturing his pelvis, several bones and suffering a concussion, he lay in a hospital unconscious for 29 days in a coma before recovering.
On April 14, 1989, Knievel's son Robbie completed the jump. The first casino at the hotel was named Circus Circus, it was intended to be the world's liveliest and most expensive casino, attracting elite gamblers from around the world. In 1969, a Federal Organized Crime Task Force accused the casino's financial manager, Jerome Zarowitz, of having ties with organized-crime figures in New York and New England. Although Zarowitz was never tried, the task force pressured Sarno and his other investors to sell the casino, which led to it being acquired by Lum's restaurant chain owners Stuart and Clifford S. Perlman for $60 million; the company soon changed its name to Caesars World. On July 15 of that year, executives lay ground on an expansion area of the hotel, they buried a time capsule in the area. Frank Sinatra began performing at Caesars Palace in 1967, after a fallout with Howard Hughes and Carl Cohen at The Sands, he signed a three-year contract. In the early morning hours of September 6, 1970, Sinatra was playing a high stakes baccarat at the casino, where he was performing at the time.
Normal limits for the game are US$2,000 per hand.
Slot machine
A slot machine, known variously as a fruit machine, the slots, poker machine/pokies, or slot, is a casino gambling machine which creates a game of chance for its customers. Its standard layout is a display with three or more reels which rotate when a lever is pulled or button pushed. Slot machines are known as one-armed bandits because they were operated by pulling upon a large mechanical lever on the side of the machine, because of their ability to empty a player's pockets and wallet as a thief would. Many modern machines are still equipped with a legacy lever in addition to the button. Slot machines include one or more currency detectors that validate the form of payment, whether coin, cash, or token; the machine pays off according to patterns of symbols appearing on its display. Slot machines are the most popular gambling method in casinos and constitute about 70 percent of the average US casino's income. Digital technology has resulted in variations on the original slot machine concept. Since the player is playing a video game, manufacturers are able to offer more interactive elements, such as advanced bonus rounds and more varied video graphics.
The "slot machine" term derives from the slots on the machine for retrieving coins. "Fruit machine" comes from the traditional fruit images on the spinning reels, such as lemons and cherries. Sittman and Pitt of Brooklyn, New York, U. S. developed a gambling machine in 1891, a precursor to the modern slot machine. It contained five drums holding a total of 50 card was based on poker; this machine proved popular and soon many bars in the city had one or more of the machines. Players would insert a nickel and pull a lever, which would spin the drums and the cards they held, the player hoping for a good poker hand. There was no direct payout mechanism, so a pair of kings might get the player a free beer, whereas a royal flush could pay out cigars or drinks, the prizes wholly dependent on what was on offer at the local establishment. To make the odds better for the house, two cards were removed from the deck: the ten of spades and the jack of hearts, which doubles the odds against winning a royal flush.
The drums could be rearranged to further reduce a player's chance of winning. Due to the vast number of possible wins with the original poker card-based game, it proved impossible to come up with a way to make a machine capable of making an automatic payout for all possible winning combinations. Somewhere between 1887 and 1895, Charles Fey of San Francisco, California, U. S. devised a much simpler automatic mechanism with three spinning reels containing a total of five symbols – horseshoes, spades, a Liberty Bell. The bell gave the machine its name. By replacing ten cards with five symbols and using three reels instead of five drums, the complexity of reading a win was reduced, allowing Fey to devise an effective automatic payout mechanism. Three bells in a row produced ten nickels. Liberty Bell spawned a thriving mechanical gaming device industry; when the use of these gambling devices was banned in his home state after a few years, Fey still could not keep up with demand for the game elsewhere.
The Liberty Bell machine was so popular. Thus in 1907, manufacturer Herbert Mills from Chicago produced a slot machine called the Operator Bell. By 1908 lots of "bell" machines were installed in most cigar stores, bowling alleys and barber shops. Early machines, including an 1899 "Liberty Bell", are now part of the Nevada State Museum's Fey Collection. Other early machines, such as the trade stimulator, gave out winnings in the form of fruit-flavoured chewing gums with pictures of the flavours as symbols on the reels; the popular cherry and melon symbols derive from this machine. The BAR symbol now common in slot machines was derived from an early logo of the Bell-Fruit Gum Company; the payment of food prizes was a used technique to avoid laws against gambling in a number of states, for this reason a number of gumball and other vending machines were regarded with mistrust by the courts. The two Iowa cases of State v. Ellis and State v. Striggles are both used in classes on criminal law to illustrate the concept of reliance upon authority as it relates to the axiomatic ignorantia juris non excusat.
In these cases, a mint vending machine was declared to be a gambling device because by chance the machine would give the next user a number of tokens exchangeable for more candy. Despite the fact that the result of the next use would be displayed on the machine, the courts ruled that "he machine appealed to the player's propensity to gamble, and, vice."In 1963, Bally developed the first electromechanical slot machine, called Money Honey. The electromechanical approach of the 1960s allowed Money Honey to be the first slot machine with a bottomless hopper and automatic payout of up to 500 coins without the help of an attendant; the popularity of this machine led to the increasing predominance of electronic games, the side lever soon became vestigial. The first true video slot machine was developed in 1976 in Kearny Mesa, California by the Las-Vegas based Fortune Coin Co; this slot machine used
MGM Grand Las Vegas
The MGM Grand Las Vegas is a hotel and casino located on the Las Vegas Strip in Paradise, Nevada. The MGM Grand is the largest single hotel in the United States with 6,852 rooms, it is the third-largest hotel complex in the world by number of rooms and second-largest hotel resort complex in the United States behind the combined The Venetian and The Palazzo. When it opened in 1993, the MGM Grand was the largest hotel complex in the world. Owned and operated by MGM Resorts International, the 30-floor main building is 293 ft high; the property includes five outdoor pools and waterfalls that cover 6.6 acres, a 380,000 sq ft convention center, the MGM Grand Garden Arena, the Grand Spa. It houses numerous shops, night clubs and the largest casino in Clark County, which occupies 171,500 sq ft. Located on the Tropicana - Las Vegas Boulevard intersection, pedestrians are not allowed to cross at street level. Instead, the MGM Grand is linked by overhead pedestrian bridges to its neighboring casinos: to the south across Tropicana Avenue, the Tropicana, to the west across the Strip, New York-New York.
The property was the site of the Golf Club Motel during the 1960s. In 1972, Tom Wiesner co-founded Southwest Securities Development Company, founded Wiesner Investment Company. In November 1973, Southwest Securities Development was planning the Airport Marina Hotel, to be built at the site of the 170-room Golf Club Motel, located near McCarran International Airport. Southwest planned to add a 14-story addition with 518 rooms. Fred Harvey Company would serve as the operator of the hotel, its restaurants, other areas of the resort. Fred Harvey had opened hotels in other parts of the United States under the Airport Marina name. Southwest planned to construct a 28,400 sq ft casino that would operate separately from Fred Harvey; the 700-room Marina, located at 3805 South Las Vegas Boulevard, was built by Wiesner Investment Company and was opened in 1975. In 1989, Wiesner and his partners sold the Marina to Kirk Kerkorian, who bought the Tropicana Country Club, located behind the Marina and across Tropicana Avenue from the Tropicana and San Rémo hotels to obtain the site that would become the home of the MGM Grand.
Kerkorian saw the Marina as a stable and solidly built resort, decided not to destroy the hotel, but to build around it. During that time, the Marina was known as the MGM-Marina Hotel; the Marina closed on November 30, 1990, ground was broken for the new casino hotel complex on October 7, 1991. The Marina hotel building still exists as the west wing of the main hotel building; when the latest MGM Grand opened on December 18, 1993, it was owned by MGM Grand Inc. At that time it had an extensive Wizard of Oz theme, including the green "Emerald City" color of the building and the decorative use of Wizard of Oz memorabilia. After entering the casino's main entrance, one would find themselves in the Oz Casino facing Emerald City. Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion were seen in front of the city; the Emerald City attraction featured an elaborate yellow brick road walk-through, complete with the cornfield, apple orchard, haunted forest, as well as audio-animatronic figures of Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion, the Wicked Witch of the West.
It would end at the door of the city, leading inside for a performance of "The Wizard's Secrets". When MGM Grand began its extensive refurbishment in 1996, the Oz Casino was the first to go; the Emerald City was demolished, the Emerald City Gift Shop was moved to a new shopping section of the casino. The store remained open until early 2003; when the MGM Grand opened, the intention was to create the first true destination hotel in the Las Vegas area by including the MGM Grand Adventures Theme Park behind the casino. The plan was to make the Las Vegas Strip more family friendly by providing activities for those too young to linger inside the casino; the theme park did not reopen for the 2001 season. The site was redeveloped as a luxury condominium and hotel complex called The Signature at MGM Grand, opened in 2006; the resort's original entrance consisted of a giant lion head, made of fiberglass and blocky in appearance, with visitors entering through the lion's mouth. The lion was a cartoon-like version of Leo the Lion.
The Las Vegas Monorail was built to connect MGM Grand to the Bally's hotel-casino in 1995. The coming-out party for the monorail, on behalf of Bally's, consisted of showgirls and guys from Bally's famed show, Jubilee!, helping groups to the monorail. Characters from The Wizard of Oz greeted the groups on the MGM side; the track was updated to become the southernmost section of the Las Vegas Monorail. The MGM Grand station was refurbished, the trains were replaced with Bombardier M-VI's, the track was extended beyond the southern station to provide for track switching for the trains, as well as a starting point for a potential future southern extension to the monorail line. In May 1996, MGM Grand Inc. announced a 30-month, four-phase renovation of the resort that would cost more than $250 million. The project would include replacing the property's lion entrance with a six-story gold lion structure; the first phase was to begin in June 1996, would focus on the resort's restaurant, food court and arcade area, with the addition of several new restaurants.
The second phase would include the $15 million reconstruction of the lion entrance. Other changes would include a 300,000 sq ft convention center.
