Jockey Club can teach its giant neighbors some economic lessons
View from the Jockey Club Jockey Club webcam
The room was booked over the phone because the website couldn t handle a same day reservation. Valet parking cost $20 because the attendant couldn t break a $5 bill and, yes, they actually charge. Our belongings were dragged through a Byzantine maze of non ADA compliant steps and hallways to get to the bank of elevators that take guests to their rooms.
And so, around the corner I went to line up for the tiny service elevator, which couldn t hold more than a couple of people and their lugpatagonia guide pants ski1gage. But it was worth the wait, if only because it delayed my arrival in a spacious but sad one bedroom suite with red dotted carpet, a paisley couch and one of those thick, maroon motel room bedspreads that you just know is a Petri dish for germs. Also, the stale air was a bouquet of hard to identify aromas, one of which was most certainly Marlboro despite the fact that the place claims to be nonsmoking.
Oh man, I tweeted. The staycation from hell well under way. The elevators are busted, the room smells like rotted pumpkin.
A few minutes later, my partner, Miles, texted a private response: Seriously? Why do we have to stay there, again?
Because I had always wanted to. But that was kind of a lie. In fact, it never occurred to me to have anything at all to do with the Jockey Club until about four years ago when those two squat, chalk colored boxes of time shares began to be swallowed up by New Vegas in an epic way. The Bellagio emerged to the north in the 1990s, but that had merely replaced the Dunes. Otherwise, the place remained largely unmolested by progress until the skyscrapers of CityCenter and Cosmopolitan began crowding around it like concrete and glass bullies.
Yet there was more to this than idle fascination. I had come to believe that the odd eyesore that is the Jockey Club, seated amid all that opulence, was a significant symbol of what would someday prove to be the gravest problem with CityCenter and several other developments along the Strip. The Jockey Club is a decayed anachronism, but it is also as forever as a diamond.
There are 14,000 different time share owners and about six dozen full share owners at 3700 Las Vegas Blvd. South, a nice, round number of an address that denotes its seniority. It was a Nixon era version of what we now know as New Urbanism, a notion that there s virtue and/or utility in denpatagonia guide pants ski2se developmentpatagonia guide pants ski where residents can live, work and play, as the wonks intone. Smith built Jockey Club to deploy a primitive version of this concept, and he discovered pretty fast that with a few precious exceptions New York chief among them the idea fails because, to hear Smith tell it, Little did I know, you don t live where you work.
Steve Friess
A view of the narrow sidewalk where Jockey Club patagonia better sweater dyani stripeand Cosmopolitan visitors can take their dogs.
The Jockey Club was born as only the third condominium project in the state, but buyers began asking Smith to establish a rental progrpatagonia guide pants ski0am immediately after closing on their units. (They started at $24,000 then, or about $124,000 today, adjusted for inflation.) The people who had bought the units had, by and large, no intention of residing there, nor were they Strip employees shortening their commutes. They were flippers.
From 1974 to 1977, we operated basically like a hotel, Smith said. Caesars Palace or the Las Vegas Convention Center would rely on the 348 unit place as a primo location for room blocks during peak events. People didn t live there.
In 1977, the developers tookpatagonia mens full zip better sweater jacket back the last 20 units, which hadn t been closed on, and tried out a newfangled business model never attempted in Nevada: The time share. Folks could buy a particular week in a particular unit and then pay a yearly maintenance fee that generally amounted to a fraction of what a traditional hotel room for a week might cost. In those days, the time share industry wasn t quite so efficiently international nowadays, properties are often part of large networks where owners can exchange their time in one location for time in other destinations but the idea caught on, and there are now more than 200,000 time share units in Las Vegas.
It took until 1993 for the Jockey Club to sell out every last week (each unit in a time share represents 52 weeks for sale), in part because buying the condos back from the owners was an incremental process. And there remain 78 full owners, a handful of whom actually live there.
Of course, there s still a rental program. Weeks go unused, so vacationers like me can hop online or call up and book rooms like we would at any other hotel in the city. But Smith, a gruff and defensive fellow with a hippie esque untamed white beard who rules this fiefdom into his patagonia discount code ebayninth decade, hung up on me back then. Just before he did so, he told me I would have to wait until after Cosmopolitan opened to write about the Jockey Club.
Steve Friess
A number of parking spaces in the garage at the Cosmopolitan are dedicated to Jockey Club guests.
Of course, I didn t have to, but I did anyway. The Cosmo wouldn t even exist had Smith and his partner not sold off a chunk of their Strip fronted property to other developers who were supposed to open a casino. Gaming chips were made, too, for the patagonia employment opportunities superiorJockey Club Casino, but the project failed before it began, and a few years later the original Cosmo developers took over. Those never deployed gaming chips, by the way, are still for sale on eBay.
Officially, both sides of the weird Cosmo Jockey Club relationship are all smiles. Theoretically, the Jockey Club is a sort of crazy uncle in the attic to hip, lush Cosmo attached by a set of elevators hidden in a nook of the casino to which even many Cosmo employees have difficulty providing directions.
Cosmo CEO John Unwin, in a preopening interview, told me they welcome their neighbors to partake in the new resort s offerings, including access to their sparkly rooftop pools. During construction, Cosmo paid for a valet service to park Jockey Club guests cars at Planet Hollywood because they took over the time share s longtime surface parking, and now that it s open, there s a large expanse of choice parking spaces in Cosmo s garage dedicated to Jockey Club guests. Attendants are serious about enforcing that, too; I was chased down at a Cosmo garage elevator by one who forced me to move my car when I had accidentally put it in a Jockey Club space.
And Smith feels that Cosmo provides many things he, as a developer, failed to deliver: They gave us amenities that we have needed and longed for the patagonia guide jacket or coat30 some years we ve been here. We had promised to build another tower and put restaurants and stuff like that in. We couldn t give them that, but now with the Cosmopatagonia guide pants ski3politan, they have everything they want.
Yet there s clearly more to it. The Jockey Club s swimming pool was once an open air space, but sunbathers there are liable to earn checkerboard tans thanks to netting that sepatagonia guide pants guyrves as a ceiling. It was put in place to shield pool users from construction debris and remains because Cosmo guests occasionally drop stuff from the oppatagonia guide pants partyen air balconies. At night, it is lit up with a lattice of light bulbs that give it a vaguely California backyard feel, but the terrace has become the sole smoking area for Jockey Club guests not brazen enough patagonia guide pants 33x29to pollute their rooms as well as a path between the property and elevators that lead to both the parking garage and patagonia hi loft down sweater reviewsCosmo s casino.
In January, when we stayed at the then brand new Cosmo with our dogs, Black, Jack and Aces, more than one employee offered this helpful tip for taking our dogs to do their business: Go to a concrete alley just north of the Jockey Club pool. Ouch.
