A view of the atrium and area for a 10,000-square-foot Samsung screen in the Las Vegas Convention Center West Hall expansion, Monday, Oct. 12, 2020.
Tuesday, Oct. 13, 2020 | 2 a.m.
On an open-air terrace on the third floor of the Las Vegas Convention Center West Hall expansion, Steve Hill stood with a large chunk of the Strip serving as his backdrop.
Resort towers, including Wynn Las Vegas, Encore and the Venetian, glistened behind Hill, president and CEO of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, in the late afternoon light.
“It’s a great day to show it off,” Hill said of the the expansion, which is 95% complete.
At least initially, not as many conventiongoers will see the $980 million West Hall expansion, located between Las Vegas Boulevard and the existing Convention Center campus on Paradise Road, because the pandemic has mostly paused the convention industry.
Hill, who came to the authority in 2018, said the project is on track to finish on time, with a target date of Dec. 14. Work started on the 1.4 million-square-foot expansion in September 2018.
“We set the deadline even before I started at the LVCVA,” Hill said. “It was a very tight timeframe when it was set. There’s a pressure that comes along with setting an aggressive deadline. It’s similar to what happened for Allegiant Stadium. It may not have been comfortable, even from the start, but we needed to find a way to make it happen.”
Throughout the massive exhibit hall — it’s big enough to fit about eight football fields — signs of an unfinished product are visible.
Pallets of supplies were stationed on the floor in many areas. Anything from bags of grout, containers of adhesives, drywall supplies, and orange five-gallon buckets with the Home Depot logo on them.
There’s still two months to get that final 5% done, but the bones are in place. So is some of the carpeting, a pattern of blues and red/orange colors.
All of the electrical and HVAC work, along with the lighting, is already in, said Terry Miller of Miller Project Management, project manager for the expansion.
“We’re very close,” Miller said. “That last 5% is always a bear, to get everything set up.”
At the peak of the project, about 1,200 workers were at the site daily. Right now, about 800 are there every day, Miller said.
Sitting on ground that used to be home to the old Landmark and Riviera hotels, the structure welcomes natural light at its south-facing main lobby atrium off Convention Center Drive.
Once complete, the atrium will feature a 10,000-square-foot Samsung digital screen, which will often be used for exhibitor branding purposes. The atrium itself is 116 feet high.
The West Hall will have 80 meeting rooms, along with four glass-enclosed “show manager” offices that will overlook exhibit hall spaces.
At a glance, it seems the expansion will have room for just about anything. It will have 41 loading docks, along with a massive 59-by-32-foot “elephant door” that will allow for something as big as a yacht to enter the hall.
“The expansion hall might not be too exciting for people who just come in to look, but there are things this space will have that are very important for trade shows,” Hill said. “Having the right ratio of meeting space to convention space is important. We don’t have that in the current convention center. That one square foot of meeting space for every four square feet of convention space, that’s how trade shows are put on these days. There’s a much heavier component of education, and of networking and sitting down with customers than there was 20 or 30 years ago.”
Hill also pointed to the fact that of the 600,000 square feet of space in the West Hall, 328,000 square feet will be column-free. It will represent, he said, the largest column-free space in North America.
Technology was also a big deal for the hall’s designers. The hall will have over 500 “floor boxes” for power hookups, and will be equipped with 5G wireless service from Cox Communications, which the LVCVA says will provide “blazing fast” internet connections for exhibitors and attendees.
Access to the West Hall will be available from other parts of the Convention Center’s 200-acre campus via an underground transport system being built by the Boring Company, an Elon Musk firm.
That $52.5 million project is expected to be finished, Hill said, at around the same time as the expansion.
“We think it’s a beautiful building and that it represents Las Vegas well,” Hill said. “A trade show will also be able to happen as efficiently and effectively as possible, and we’re equally proud of that. A lot of the trade shows we have here, their business model is based on being able to have those shows, and they know there’s no place like Vegas to do that, whether here in our building or up and down the Strip.”
