This city is the epitome of American fantasy, taken to its most entertaining heights or its most ridiculous depths, depending on your perspective.
But any way you look at it, Las Vegas proves that the appetite for fun in this country is immense. And that appetite is growing to the point where only newer, bigger, more exotic and more technologically advanced entertainment complexes can satisfy it.
Developers proposing such an entertainment complex for Chicago, complete with casinos, have cited the demand for fantasy attractions in their pitches for the project. Mayor Richard Daley has said he supports the $2 billion proposal as a means to bring family-oriented entertainment into downtown Chicago.
Retail developers, architects and designers have noted the fascination with fantasy for several years and have been pushing the imaginative boundaries of entertainment centers in recent projects around the world.
”The idea is to bring recreation, culture and entertainment to what is basically a retail place,” said Charles D. Smith of Bullock Smith & Partners, a Knoxville architecture and planning firm that specializes in the design of leisure facilities.
”You want the development to say, `Here`s a place with exciting things happening,”` he said.
Members of the International Council of Shopping Centers, meeting in Las Vegas recently at their annual convention, got a good taste of what the future holds in retail/entertainment from a panel of experts who are dreaming up and building those projects.
And they got a hefty dose of the Las Vegas version of the concept with the grand opening of the Forum Shops at Caesars, billed by its developers as the ”Shopping Wonder of the World.”
”Most of you may have heard in the media that retail is dead. Well, all you have to do is look around you to see that it is not,” said Sheldon Gordon, the co-developer, along with Melvin Simon & Associates, of the 70-emporium mall.
”All you need today is a lot of imagination and a lot of ingenuity,”
said Gordon, a Los Angeles-based shopping center developer.
The Forum Shops at Caesars has been cited by the proposers of the Chicago casino complex-Hilton Hotels, Circus Circus Enterprises and Caesars World Inc.-as the kind of innovative retail element that would be a part of their plan for the Windy City.
”This is going to be one of the most irresistible things seen in retailing in the United States,” boasted Melvin Simon, chairman of the Indianapolis-based development company that bears his name.
The Forum Shops is designed to resemble a curving street of ancient Rome, with a rounded ceiling painted as sky. There are columns and arches, central piazzas, fountains and statues, including the Festival Fountain, where animated robotic statues of Bacchus, Apollo, Plutus and Venus hold sway over a laser, music and sound-effects display.
”It`s like a Rodeo Drive for Las Vegas,” said one blackjack pit boss who viewed the center after its opening.
Something like the 240,000-square-foot Forum Shops, which includes retailers such as Louis Vuitton, Escada, Gucci and Spago restaurant, would be only a small part of the proposed 3-million-square-foot casino complex in Chicago.
There are many other entertainment components that can be put together, and are being put together, in a wide-ranging variety to create other sophisticated entertainment complexes or simply to energize an aging shopping mall.
”We`re creating places that can become destinations within themselves, entertainment anchors,” said Paul Jacobs III, a principal in the Los Angeles office of architects RTKL Associates Inc.
In Thailand, RTKL went through several versions of a plan for a new entertainment center, mixing and matching elements such as amusement rides, playlands, bowling alleys, casinos, bars, nightclubs, cinemas, waterfront attractions and food pavilions.
”You have to look at the different operations and figure out what is appropriate for the marketplace,” Jacobs said.
”Over time, these entertainment projects will be as different as regional malls have become,” he said. ”But they are not a solution within themselves.”
The next step in the evolution of the fantasy development may be in Germany, Jacobs believes. In Oberhausen, in the Rhein-Ruhr Valley, consultant Ron McCarthy-who was responsible for the leisure facilities in the West Edmonton Mall in Alberta, Canada, the world`s biggest mall-is working on plans for a 1.2-million-square-foot regional entertainment center that would include a new marina and an 18,000-seat indoor arena developed by Madison Square Garden Corp.
The centerpiece will be a 35-acre Tivoli Garden, based on the famous public space of Copenhagen that includes gardens, restaurants and shops. Chicago casino developers have said they would also like to model a portion of their project on Tivoli Garden.
”The success of Fantasyland (in the West Edmonton Mall) certainly caught the attention of other developers (after it opened in 1982). But since those early days, there has been a lot of innovation and expansion,” McCarthy said. ”The two trends we see driving this are a return to family life and a desire to attract children to retail projects. This is really back-to-basics family entertainment,” McCarthy said. ”And it`s not just a North American phenomenon.”
But back to basics doesn`t have to mean down to earth. The new generation of family-oriented entertainment can be very high-tech.
Enter Exhilarama, an entertainment center designed as a shopping center anchor space. The brainchild of Edison Brothers Mall Entertainment, a division of shoe retailing giant Edison Brothers Stores Inc., Exhilarama is built around the virtual reality games that allow participants to join fantasy worlds electronically.
”The liberal definition of shoes is that they are things to take you places and get you there,” said Andrew Halliday, president of Edison Brothers Mall Entertainment. ”So I guess this fits.
”We have a very large vested interest in regional shopping centers and we want to make sure they are retained as destinations among the many competitive alternatives in the market. So we asked ourselves what can we do to refresh those regional centers.”
Much as food courts have revolutionized the way people view malls and eating, Halliday said Edison Brothers wanted to develop an entertainment court concept that would change the way people looked at malls and fun.
”This rises above the level of the arcade,” Halliday said. ”We`ve chosen theatrical set designs as the mode of delivery (working with Hollywood prop and special effects giant Cinnabar) because we realize this has to be fresh, has to be rotated.”
At the center of the Exhilarama entertainment court are virtual reality games, which can allow players entry into worlds as diverse as that of ”Star Wars” or ”Dungeons and Dragons.”
In addition, the prototype includes a water themed area, an electronic games center that Halliday said would operate ”not at all like a game room but like a science museum,” a Laser Storm interactive game set and a 5,000-square-foot controlled access location for younger children and families that would allow for parties and other group gatherings.
St. Louis-based Edison Brothers is working on the mockup of the prototype now in its hometown. Halliday said the company expects to begin implementing the concept later this year, taking it to malls across the country in the next several years.
Chicago`s urban entertainment complex would include the most advanced attractions possible, developers promise. They have hired Douglas Trumbull of Lenox, Mass., who has a long resume as a special effects designer, to create as many as 10 new attractions for the proposed project.
Trumbull said his attractions would incorporate the latest in motion picture processes and special effects, including virtual reality, interactive movie simulation, rides and 3-D experiences.
Glenn Schaeffer, president of Circus Circus, said such entertainment features would encompass about 80 percent of the proposed Chicago project with 20 percent left for casino space.
The political realities in Chicago and in Illinois right now have the fantasy on hold. But from listening to the experts the ICSC pulled together, the developers` enthusiasm does reflect the current elevated status afforded projects centered on fun and fantasy.
”A project of this caliber can be a centerpiece for civic and leisure activities, in effect a kind of town square of the future,” Trumbull said.
