ARIA Report
Last night CK and I made our first trip to ARIA, the casino that opened at CityCenter last week. Our dominant thought after a night of poker and wandering around the casino was, "Who is this casino intended for?"
Everything in the casino feels like it's trying a little too hard. CK asked me, "Does every fucking thing in here have to be a design element?" Of course not -- functional elements can remain purely functional and few people would care. But that's not the way the project has been conceived and implemented. In ARIA, even the toilet stall doors in the men's room are a design element.
When you look at the history of the CityCenter project that shouldn't be surprising. CityCenter (and by extension ARIA) was first conceived in 2004. 2004, if you remember, was the year in which the U.S. economy was soaring towards frenzied and excessive heights on the basis of free and easy credit. Ground-breaking for CityCenter took place in June 2006, still slightly ahead of the first cracks in the economy.
In many ways CityCenter is a monument to the excesses of the decade -- the "spend today what you'll earn tomorrow" mentality. To CK and me it felt like ARIA -- and perhaps CityCenter as a whole -- is intended for people who are going to spend, spend, spend without a care in the world. How else do you explain spending $30 for a cheeseburger and a beer at the casino "cafe"? How else do you explain all of the "design elements" everywhere you go? How else do you explain the no-expense-spared feel of everything in the casino?
The problem is that the U.S. pscyhe has moved past that unlimited-spending mentality after the economic shocks of the last eighteen months. People are living within their means again. The new fiscal prudence and sobriety suggests that the pool of people that CityCenter and ARIA were designed for is now much, much smaller than when the project was first conceived.
That's not to say ARIA's not a nice place. The poker room is right by the door that leads into the casino from the valet and the self-park. Last night the room was packed with games ranging from 3-6 LHE to 9-18 Omaha Hi/Lo to 4-8 mix to 5-10 NLHE and the level of the opponents (in the 1-3 NLHE at least) was about what you'd expect to find at Venetian or Bellagio.
Yet as VegasRex recently worried, ARIA is just a vagina. It serves a purpose but it could just as easily serve that purpose without the lightning-bolt pubic hair design and the glitter that dusts its edges. When you get down to it, who cares about lightning bolts and glitter?
The world will be watching to see how ARIA fares once the fanfare surrounding its opening has faded into the ether. Things could easily go either way. As for poker, right now the action in the room is great but not any different than a place like Venetian.