The Great Cities Have Pie-Shaped Buildings

Las Vegas Casinoist Mark Advent, the one responsible for New York-New York, now plans to develop a retail-office-entertainment complex called the “East Village” just off the Strip:

And so, in true Las Vegas fashion, Mr. Advent has decided to remedy what he sees as the city’s lack of a neighborhood fabric by building one of his own. On the corner of Tropicana Avenue and Paradise Road, on a vacant patch of desert near the airport, will rise East Village, a retail-office-entertainment complex inspired by Manhattan’s strollable streets. The $250 million project is tentatively scheduled to open in 2007.

Playing fast and loose with geographical borders, the development will contain a scale model of the Washington Square arch, a meatpacking district and a diamond district, which, as New Yorkers know, is a good 30 blocks north of the East Village. “It’s not an exact replica,” Mr. Advent explained, adding that the complex was more an homage to great neighborhoods (which explains the part of the development based on Pike Place Market in Seattle). The name, he said, stems from the location, which is one mile east of the Las Vegas strip, and from the fact that “it really is like a little village.”

Crazy! It can’t possibly work! No way! Way:

For his latest project, Mr. Advent is determined to build the kind of richly appointed, idiosyncratic structures found throughout Manhattan. Facades will be brick, and in some cases, detailing will be wrought iron. “Other developers keep saying: ‘Your buildings aren’t square. You’ve got a pie-shaped building. That’s going to cost more,'” Mr. Advent said. “I’m going, yeah, it’s a pie-shaped building. When you go to great cities, they build pie-shaped buildings.”