So detailed it scared me.
Written: Oct 16 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: The detail...amazing.
Cons: Some of the recreated restaurants were about 4 times the price of their New York counterparts.
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| etain's Full Review: New York New York |
It is the custom of Chinese takeout places in New York City, as it is in other cities, to strew menus from their establishments in the lobbies of apartment buildings, or to sneak into the building and slip menus under everyone's doors. In New York in particular, the residents take umbrage at this and strike back by posting signs warning "NO MENUS!" with varying signs and symbols of warning. This factoid is relevant to this review.
A fellow New Yorker and I were staying elsewhere in Las Vegas (my friend was a reporter covering a convention, I was sharing the room) and took a quick stroll over to the New York New York casino -- not to gamble, not to check in, but just to look. What we saw inside was a stunningly and lovingly recreated salute to our hometown -- not just getting the obvious sites, but details that we thought only we knew about.
Different portions of the casino floor are laid out to resemble different sections of the city -- you have the "Grand Central Station" room, the "Greenwich Village" section, the "Times Square" section, the "Central Park" section, and the like. We started in the Grand Central Station room; as anyone who has visited GCS, or who has seen the movie THE FISHER KING, knows, there is a huge main hall there, made of marble, with a mural depicting the constellations on the ceiling, and a big clock stationed over an information booth. We took two steps into the casino and were taken aback that there, in a reduced scale, WAS the main hall of Grand Central Station. The mural in the ceiling. The marble. The clock. We blinked, we walked on.
We stopped in the "Soho" section next; this is mostly given over to shops and the like and didn't bear as much of a resemblance to anything back home. We poked around in the shops, then swung out to take a look at the "Central Park" section. We glanced around at fake trees and a little artificial brook meandering through the floor -- and I noticed a small bridge leading over said brook to a restaurant, a bridge that looked exactly like Central Park's famous Bow Bridge. The restaurant wasn't actually named "Tavern On The Green," but bore a striking resemblance to it. We wandered about the Central Park section some more, noticing after a while that the rug in that section was patterned with leaves; we studied it as we walked, then suddenly found ourselves staring at a replica of the black-and-white marble "Imagine" memorial sign set into the ground in Central Park's Strawberry Fields.
We walked on. "Times Square" was next; we didn't see much of it, as my friend lives near the genuine article and didn't want to see something he could see at home. But I did note that some of the big neon signs that have been in Times Square for years were lovingly recreated.
Then came "Greenwich Village." This is where it looked like the most attention had been paid -- there is a huge cluster of restaurants and shops here, laid out amid a collection of meandering paths that resemble the crazy quilt of streets in Greenwich Village. Each storefront was set in a mockup of a brownstone apartment building -- the restaurants all had "sidewalk tables," the "streets" all had "streetsigns" bearing the names of many of the streets back home. An exit from the casino floor to the hotel was designed to look exactly like the entrance to the Christopher Street Subway station. One wall was festooned with grafitti. We saw a restaurant that sold nothing but hot dogs and tropical fruit smoothies -- just like a chain of similar stores here in New York. Fake manhole covers were in the floors, exuding fake steam. There were two pizza places sitting beside each other; one was even named "Ray's."
Suddenly my friend grabbed my arm and pointed at one of the mock "apartment building doors" that we were walking past. There were a number of such fake building entrances scattered throughout the place -- instead of being another door to another restaurant or shop, occasionally such a fake door would be stuck into the wall for decorative effect. But there was a sign stuck in the fake window of this one. I looked closer at it.
It was a "No Menus" sign. And the sign had been made of an authentic takeout menu from an actual Chinese restaurant in Greenwich Village -- the very Chinese Restaurant that had begun the practice of spreading menus throughout the city in the first place.
Now, ONLY PEOPLE IN NEW YORK know about this. No one else in the world who sees that "No Menus" sign will know how much of a constant it actually is in New York. Yet there it was.
My friend and I were not actually there to gamble; simply to see how faithful the casino was to our hometown. I wouldn't say that a trip to the New York New York Casino would replace a trip to the genuine article, but whomever the designers were certainly did their homework...
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
etain
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Location: New York, NY
Reviews written: 19
Trusted by: 1 member
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