Viva Las Paris! Vegas Improves On The Real Thing

Forget Paris. Las Vegas is about to offer you a much, much better version: one without French people. One without dog poop on the sidewalks. One where the menus are in English and the waiters say, “Hi, I’m Dwayne,” and return promptly with your food.

It’s called Paris Las Vegas, and its most striking symbol will be an “Eiffel Tower” 50 stories high, about half the stature of the real thing, with a stunning view of greater Las Vegas, a city of light in its own right.

On its 24 acres also will be a toy Arc de Triomphe and approximations of the Paris opera house, the Seine River and its bridges, the Ile St. Louis, the Rue de la Paix, the Montparnasse quarter, a Metro station (where a monorail will stop), and many other sights seen by tourists who today have to make the more complicated trip to Paris, France.

Paris Las Vegas is a $750 million Hilton Hotels Corp. project with a 3,000-room hotel, nine restaurants and an 85,000-square-foot casino. Construction will begin in about a week on the last available patch of sand on the “Golden Mile” of the Las Vegas Strip, convenient to Ancient Rome, the Egypt of the Pharaohs, Manhattan and King Arthur’s England.

The city the new project seeks to evoke is, loosely speaking, the Paris of the last turn of the century, and it will be open for business just in time for the next one. Hilton honcho Arthur Goldberg was here with a corporate retinue to unveil the project. They were received at Paris’ most famous “hotel,” the Hotel de Ville - that is, city hall - by Mayor Jean Tiberi.

Not visibly appalled by the spectacle of Paris kitsch and cliche, Tiberi viewed the architectural renderings and pronounced himself “impressed by the gigantism of this project … by its quality and its chic.”

French disdain for American excess seems to have been suspended in the face of this monstrous homage in Nevada. One Hilton official said “we haven’t encountered it at all.”