“The Park was always intended to be kind of an oasis for somebody walking down Las Vegas Boulevard,” says Dan Quinn, senior vice president of entertainment and arena venue operations for MGM Resorts International.“We’ve got all the glitz and glamor of the neon and the shiny modern design, but we give a little park-like escape to people who want a more relaxing environment.”
The Park is a space of necessity. T-Mobile Arena is recessed from the street; it needed a walkway from the Strip and a large plaza to accommodate the crowds queueing up for sports and concerts. But it didn’t need water features, an ever-growing canopy of green trees, and a striking, 40-foot-tall Marco Cochrane sculpture of a dancing woman that glows from inside. Those elements were added to the Park to create a true sense of place for what could have been a basic concrete plaza, or a corridor of retail shops. And it’s programmed in ways that transcend liminal space.
“We’ve been lucky enough to host two Las Vegas Aces championship parades, a VGK celebration … And we’ve done a few private events out there, dining festivals or convention groups,” says Quinn, who refers to the buildings surrounding the space—T-Mobile Arena, New York-New York, the Park MGM resort and Dolby Live theater—as a “neighborhood.”
Quinn notes that many visitors simply come to see “Bliss Dance,” Cochrane’s Burning Man sculpture. “There’s not a day that I walk around the neighborhood that I don’t go by Bliss and somebody’s not striking the pose and taking a picture,” he says. And he’s pleased at the amount of activity surrounding a beloved character pop-up: “I’m always amazed at the amount of activity that the Hello Kitty Cafe activation drives.”
“For the person who wants to come down and experience the neighborhood before an event, or to have an excuse to hang out and stay a little bit later, the Park has definitely fulfilled all those hopes and expectations,” Quinn says.
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