By Hal Rothman, Photographs: Theodore Marienthal

he signs of change are everywhere on the Strip, as new projects sprout from the ground like spring blooms. The idea was there last year, but it was all talk. Now comes the proof: The steel superstructures reach skyward, orange cones block lanes of traffic, sales offices proliferate, and from the chaos, a new look emerges once again in Las Vegas.

But it'll be different this time, as the skyline once dominated by huge, horizon-filling hotels now has the graceful upward sweep of classic modern urban space. New projects surge dramatically toward the sky as never before, in tight proximity to one another and the city's hotels. It's a revolution of gargantuan proportions, not only visual but also conceptual. This new Las Vegas will operate with a different rhythm, and it has already brought a new kind of developer to town.

Ian Bruce Eichner, a former New York City assistant district attorney who transformed the skyline of Manhattan before developing Continuum on South Beach in Miami, has brought his unique perspective to Las Vegas. Just south of the Bellagio, The Cosmopolitan offers a sophisticated mixed-use development with brilliant Strip frontage. This exquisite 8.5-acre project is a canvas for Eichner's dreams, a 500,000-square-foot, middle- to high-end multiuse property with 2,250 hotel and condo units, a separate tower with more than 300 condo units, an 80,000-square-foot casino, and more than 300,000 square feet of retail space. The Cosmopolitan is designed to fill a niche in the complicated local real-estate market. Eichner has targeted not the highest tier, but the one just beneath it; not the largest conventions, but smaller ones where company leadership seeks a little more.

New markets are always a risk for developers, and no place makes people's eyes bigger than their stomachs more than Las Vegas. The condo craze here remains just that—a craze, Eichner says. Las Vegas has never had a streetscape culture. It hasn't had a walking culture. And it has never had a vertical culture. "The [condo] phenomenon is not yet proven," Eichner cautions. "The perception is that the residential condominium market will accept an as-yet unknown number of units." To date, Las Vegas has been about "horizontal development," he notes. The trend now is distinctly vertical, but no one knows how it will play out.

The Cosmopolitan builds off the most important trend of the past 20 years. As Las Vegas has gone from gambling to gaming to tourism to entertainment over the past two decades, its customers have sought higher-quality amenities. The draw has been so strong that Eichner believes the city now resembles the South Florida market, where people own second, and sometimes even third, homes. "Las Vegas has this really substantial market in customers who come to sample a panoply of restaurants and shopping opportunities that do not involve gaming at all," he notes. This has attracted a broader range of visitors, many of whom would rather invest in a place of their own than pay for hotels. Nor do these properties have to be vacant. They can be leased or packaged for the market to produce consistent income. This is the conventional approach to local space, the reason most often cited for the heavy demand, building upward and moving from hotels to condos and time-shares...

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