51s

A baseball stadium boosts Summerlin’s urban bona fides

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The opening of the gigantic outdoor mall known as Downtown Summerlin made some locals chuckle. Downtown? It’s a mall. Come on. Even as the community embraced the destination over the past three years, the name still didn’t make sense to some of us.

That’s changing now. The opening of City National Arena, the practice facility and team headquarters for the Vegas Golden Knights, and last week’s announcement that the Howard Hughes Corporation will develop and build a new baseball stadium for the Las Vegas 51s, have already gone a long way in proving Downtown Summerlin was never just a mall.

“Most people call the retail and dining and office building [section] Downtown Summerlin and think that’s it. They heard about the Las Vegas Ballpark and say, ‘Oh, it’s right next to Downtown Summerlin,’” says Tom Warden, a Summerlin senior vice president. “All that open land around the hockey facility and where the stadium is going to go is in fact the rest of Downtown Summerlin.”

Las Vegas Ballpark will accommodate 10,000 fans and include VIP suites, game-time zones for kids (and grown-ups) looking to party and a swimming pool beyond the outfield wall. It will also host civic and charitable events and possibly some small concerts.

Two shiny new sports facilities will help refine the idea of Downtown Summerlin as a community hub, but there’s more. The rest of the land between Charleston, Sahara, the Beltway and Town Center will be used mostly for higher-density residential development. “Not one will be a single-family, detached home,” Warden says, stressing that new urbanism is the theme. Think brownstone-style neighborhoods and mid-rise condo buildings, laced with pocket parks and suburban service businesses like grocery stores and cafés. “It will be like what we did already at Downtown Summerlin—one lane in each direction plus parallel parking and extra-wide pedestrian thoroughfares,” Warden says. “That’s how you create a very friendly, walkable urban environment.”

Sounds pretty downtowny, doesn’t it?

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Brock Radke

Brock Radke is an award-winning writer and columnist who currently occupies the role of editor-at-large at Las Vegas Weekly magazine. ...

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