Las Vegas Gambles on $8.5 Billion CityCenter

LAS VEGAS, Dec. 16, 2009— -- MGM-Mirage's CityCenter is possibly the biggest bet in Las Vegas' history. With four towering hotels, a casino, a high-end shopping complex and 42 restaurants and bars, it's an $8.5 billion, 18-million-square-foot behemoth and the crown jewel of the Strip.

Aria, the flagship hotel and casino in CityCenter, officially opens to the public Thursday. "Nightline" was given special access behind the scenes as the centerpiece hotel was put through the paces for its grand opening.

Readying a 61-story resort is a formidable task: vacuuming escalators, making 4,210 beds, stuffing 21,000 pillow cases, watering 182,000 plants, counting $117 million in poker chips. Fifty thousand bottles of wine and 500 live lobsters have been stocked for the opening.

CityCenter hired 12,000 people to staff the complex. The project amounted to a privately-funded stimulus package for Nevada. But in a sign of just how bad things are in the recession-battered city -- 177,000 job applications flooded in for the coveted spots.

Miguel Robledo was one of the lucky ones. He was unemployed for a year and half and burning through his 401(k) before being hired as an assistant restaurant manager at Aria.

As the clock counted down to opening day, Robledo had a whole new set of worries.

"The food is lacking a little in preparation. We didn't have the chicken wings. We are trying to scramble," he said. "If the warehouse doesn't have any then we check other restaurants."

In the halls underneath the complex, 200,000 uniforms were handed out from an automated uniform station. They have an entire alteration department busy fitting uniforms. In-house laundry was on overdrive.

Down the hall, where huge storage rooms are filled with everything from oysters to miniature bottles of booze for the in-room bars, a quality-control chef checked some of the 7,000 pounds of fresh blue tuna, to be served hours later in an appetizer dish at the restaurant's first meal.

"Let's remember everything we trained for," a restaurant manager said in a speech before service began. "Don't cut corners. Don't forget everything we told each other we were going to do. Things are going to go wrong, it's guaranteed. The fire alarm is probably going to go off. Some mistakes will happen in the kitchen. Let's do everything we can to try to catch those mistakes before they become major."

Meanwhile, the room service team was busy lining up its delivery carts with the precision of NASCAR drivers -- and taste testing their own menu.