5.30.07MotorCity Casino shows off new flair
By HEATHER NEWMAN
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER
High rollers, you’ve got a hot new place to hang out.
MotorCity Casino officially unveiled its new high rollers and Signature Club areas during a press tour, a high-tech and glitzy 60,000 square feet of gaming space that will go live June 7. The area is the first major opening in the casino’s $275- million permanent facility construction that is renovating its historic bread factory home and putting a skyscraper on the lot next door.
The opening next week is bad news for nonsmokers – the casino’s only nonsmoking floor will be closed June 6 as part of the ongoing renovations, and the new space allows smoking – but great news for everyone who wants to see just how over-the-top, Las Vegas-gorgeous a Detroit casino can be.
“It surpasses anything that I thought I would get excited about,” owner Marian Ilitch said. “We all had a vision and it became true and then some… I thought all casinos kind of look alike. But this casino doesn’t look alike. There are little pieces of Detroit all through the building.”
The high rollers area, which will be open to the public, features tables with $100-$5,000 limits and slots that allow players to bet hundreds of dollars a spin. The area has a "wow” feature everywhere you look. On the ceiling, thousands of individual LEDs swoop in curves designed by automotive guru Chip Foose, churning out computer-controlled geometric patterns.
That music is piped through a fully digital system so sensitive and intelligent that microphones hidden in the ceiling “listen” to the noise of patrons between songs and adjust the music volume accordingly – ramping up in the areas where sound is loudest to provide excitement and ambience during busy times, fading away during quiet times to avoid deafening patrons.
The music and the videos on screens – and there are dozens of screens ranging from individual panels on slots to flat screens on the wall to a giant curving flower of a floor-to-ceiling sculpture, made of curving metal screens also displaying videos – are controlled by a computer system and a VJ, broadcasting from the dual-booth setup in the casino’s Radio Bar.
The bar itself is worth a second look: two booths are tucked inside, one inhabited by guest DJs (the casino has made arrangements with a number of local stations to broadcast from there), the other by the casino’s own VJs. Many of the VJs will come from an arrangement with the Specs Howard School of Broadcast Arts.
In front of them is a curving wooden bar for patrons, and placed at the edges of the area are four giant columns lit from within by green bars designed to look like the digital volume display bars on a giant stereo equalizer – all of which respond, dynamically, to the music being played.
That music is piped through subwoofers tucked into the slot machine cabinets and tweeters hidden in their signs, and the overall result is surprisingly smooth and subtle. It’s definitely the best-sounding room in any of Detroit’s casinos to date.
The walls of the area are panels of bird's-eye maple and honed metal, and subtle little automotive touches abound. The wallpaper is an abstract take on a mural elsewhere in the casino that features a ’57 Cadillac grille, and a couple of royal-blue upholstered walls are covered with chrome discs reminiscent of baby-moon hubcaps. The lights in the new VIP valet parking area are taken directly from the taillight design of a 1950s Buick.
The carpeting is a mix of fire and water themes, with flames in red and gold competing in some areas with blue flames and blue bubbles. In the pit areas, thousands of two-to-four-foot acrylic tubes are suspended from the ceiling, tipped with frosted caps, and display automated patterns of colors – or even full videos. It’s a mesmerizing display that MotorCity Casino chief executive Gregg Solomon calls the casino’s take on a chandelier.
Real chandeliers made of globes of hundreds of pieces of twisted glass hang over the Signature Club area, which is reserved for those 1,500 or so gamers who spend the most time and money at the casino. Those patrons have their own restaurant – a small buffet that features diaphanous sheers, illuminated by more colored LEDs, lining the walls and contrasting heavy curtains of metal beads that divide up the dining floor.
In the Signature Club lounge area, twisting vortexes of air create intertwining lines of flame inside glass tubes lining the room, qualifying as possibly the most intricate fireplaces in the metro area.
On the outside, the casino’s expansion is the largest real-brick project in the country in the last two decades, Solomon said. Brick extends up almost half the building, topped with gorgeous swoops of stainless steel that part to show off the original peaks and brick detail of the 1916 Wagner Bakery building that most folks locally know as the Wonder Bread factory.
“We hope that we’ll continue to make bread,” he quipped.
The new heated VIP parking entrance for Signature Club members shows off especially intricate herringbone brickwork, combined with medallions based on the original building’s flourishes. (On a practical level, it also offers the casino’s best customers something the building has sorely lacked: a direct exit onto Grand River Avenue.)
A new nonsmoking poker room is dominated by the huge rust-colored smokestack that literally takes up a quarter of one wall, one of many original architectural elements the design team chose to keep. Other nonsmoking areas will return when the first floor of the original casino receives its renovation later this year.
That building is now connected seamlessly with the new skyscraper next door.
Most people won’t notice as they step into the new second-floor high rollers area that they’re actually leaving one building and entering the other.
The new design is based on automotive concept cars of the '40s and '50s, and the finished facility will include a display of those cars – along with five of Foose’s own customization projects, which are popularized on the TLC show “Overhaulin’.”
“We decided to do something completely new and completely Detroit,” Solomon said. “This casino has many, many firsts… We look at our gaming operation as a theater.”
Customers will notice practical updates as the casino completes its renovations. The restaurant spaces are being redone (including massive updates to the kitchens) throughout the casino, and a brand-new air-handling system will change out the air in the building every 10 minutes.
Contact HEATHER NEWMAN at 313-223-3336 or hnewman@freepress.com.
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070529/BUSINESS06/70529039/1019
By HEATHER NEWMAN
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER
High rollers, you’ve got a hot new place to hang out.
MotorCity Casino officially unveiled its new high rollers and Signature Club areas during a press tour, a high-tech and glitzy 60,000 square feet of gaming space that will go live June 7. The area is the first major opening in the casino’s $275- million permanent facility construction that is renovating its historic bread factory home and putting a skyscraper on the lot next door.
The opening next week is bad news for nonsmokers – the casino’s only nonsmoking floor will be closed June 6 as part of the ongoing renovations, and the new space allows smoking – but great news for everyone who wants to see just how over-the-top, Las Vegas-gorgeous a Detroit casino can be.
“It surpasses anything that I thought I would get excited about,” owner Marian Ilitch said. “We all had a vision and it became true and then some… I thought all casinos kind of look alike. But this casino doesn’t look alike. There are little pieces of Detroit all through the building.”
The high rollers area, which will be open to the public, features tables with $100-$5,000 limits and slots that allow players to bet hundreds of dollars a spin. The area has a "wow” feature everywhere you look. On the ceiling, thousands of individual LEDs swoop in curves designed by automotive guru Chip Foose, churning out computer-controlled geometric patterns.
That music is piped through a fully digital system so sensitive and intelligent that microphones hidden in the ceiling “listen” to the noise of patrons between songs and adjust the music volume accordingly – ramping up in the areas where sound is loudest to provide excitement and ambience during busy times, fading away during quiet times to avoid deafening patrons.
The music and the videos on screens – and there are dozens of screens ranging from individual panels on slots to flat screens on the wall to a giant curving flower of a floor-to-ceiling sculpture, made of curving metal screens also displaying videos – are controlled by a computer system and a VJ, broadcasting from the dual-booth setup in the casino’s Radio Bar.
The bar itself is worth a second look: two booths are tucked inside, one inhabited by guest DJs (the casino has made arrangements with a number of local stations to broadcast from there), the other by the casino’s own VJs. Many of the VJs will come from an arrangement with the Specs Howard School of Broadcast Arts.
In front of them is a curving wooden bar for patrons, and placed at the edges of the area are four giant columns lit from within by green bars designed to look like the digital volume display bars on a giant stereo equalizer – all of which respond, dynamically, to the music being played.
That music is piped through subwoofers tucked into the slot machine cabinets and tweeters hidden in their signs, and the overall result is surprisingly smooth and subtle. It’s definitely the best-sounding room in any of Detroit’s casinos to date.
The walls of the area are panels of bird's-eye maple and honed metal, and subtle little automotive touches abound. The wallpaper is an abstract take on a mural elsewhere in the casino that features a ’57 Cadillac grille, and a couple of royal-blue upholstered walls are covered with chrome discs reminiscent of baby-moon hubcaps. The lights in the new VIP valet parking area are taken directly from the taillight design of a 1950s Buick.
The carpeting is a mix of fire and water themes, with flames in red and gold competing in some areas with blue flames and blue bubbles. In the pit areas, thousands of two-to-four-foot acrylic tubes are suspended from the ceiling, tipped with frosted caps, and display automated patterns of colors – or even full videos. It’s a mesmerizing display that MotorCity Casino chief executive Gregg Solomon calls the casino’s take on a chandelier.
Real chandeliers made of globes of hundreds of pieces of twisted glass hang over the Signature Club area, which is reserved for those 1,500 or so gamers who spend the most time and money at the casino. Those patrons have their own restaurant – a small buffet that features diaphanous sheers, illuminated by more colored LEDs, lining the walls and contrasting heavy curtains of metal beads that divide up the dining floor.
In the Signature Club lounge area, twisting vortexes of air create intertwining lines of flame inside glass tubes lining the room, qualifying as possibly the most intricate fireplaces in the metro area.
On the outside, the casino’s expansion is the largest real-brick project in the country in the last two decades, Solomon said. Brick extends up almost half the building, topped with gorgeous swoops of stainless steel that part to show off the original peaks and brick detail of the 1916 Wagner Bakery building that most folks locally know as the Wonder Bread factory.
“We hope that we’ll continue to make bread,” he quipped.
The new heated VIP parking entrance for Signature Club members shows off especially intricate herringbone brickwork, combined with medallions based on the original building’s flourishes. (On a practical level, it also offers the casino’s best customers something the building has sorely lacked: a direct exit onto Grand River Avenue.)
A new nonsmoking poker room is dominated by the huge rust-colored smokestack that literally takes up a quarter of one wall, one of many original architectural elements the design team chose to keep. Other nonsmoking areas will return when the first floor of the original casino receives its renovation later this year.
That building is now connected seamlessly with the new skyscraper next door.
Most people won’t notice as they step into the new second-floor high rollers area that they’re actually leaving one building and entering the other.
The new design is based on automotive concept cars of the '40s and '50s, and the finished facility will include a display of those cars – along with five of Foose’s own customization projects, which are popularized on the TLC show “Overhaulin’.”
“We decided to do something completely new and completely Detroit,” Solomon said. “This casino has many, many firsts… We look at our gaming operation as a theater.”
Customers will notice practical updates as the casino completes its renovations. The restaurant spaces are being redone (including massive updates to the kitchens) throughout the casino, and a brand-new air-handling system will change out the air in the building every 10 minutes.
Contact HEATHER NEWMAN at 313-223-3336 or hnewman@freepress.com.
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070529/BUSINESS06/70529039/1019
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