Anyone who has lived at Vdara long enough to remember its early years remembers the corner across Harmon Avenue as something closer to a construction fence than a destination. Before it was anything else, that ground held the shell of the Harmon, a CityCenter hotel tower that MGM demolished years before it ever opened. For a while, that corner of the world's most photographed intersection was just rubble behind chain link, visible from a few dozen floors up if you happened to look down at the right angle.
It took until 2021 for anyone to do anything with it. That spring, MGM and its CityCenter partner sold the land to Las Vegas developer Brett Torino and New York's Flag Luxury Group for $80 million, and site preparation that summer included testing the pilings and footings left over from the Harmon's dismantling before anyone could pour a new foundation. The building that eventually rose there, called 63 CityCenter, topped off in April 2022. What happened after that is the part worth understanding if you live upstairs, because the corner didn't open all at once. It filled in over roughly three years, one tenant at a time, and the order those tenants arrived in tells you something the finished storefronts don't.
The Order Nobody Expected
If you assumed a luxury retail complex at the center of the Strip would open restaurant-first, the sequence at 63 CityCenter runs the other way:
- April 2023: a gift shop, billed as the largest Welcome to Las Vegas store anywhere, became the first tenant to open its doors.
- June 2023: Ocean Prime opened its flagship location on the top floor, a $20 million, 14,500-square-foot build-out that made it the largest of the brand's seventeen restaurants nationally.
- August 2023: Museum of Illusions opened its 15,000-square-foot flagship location.
- Later in 2023: ARTE MUSEUM opened across two floors and 30,000 square feet, marking the U.S. debut for the Korean design company d'strict. Ross Dress for Less and a Fat Tuesday location filled in around the same stretch of 2023.
- Late 2024: Jason Aldean's Kitchen + Bar opened, more than a year after everything else on this list.
That gap matters. By the end of 2023, the corner had shopping, a steakhouse, and two immersive museums, and then nothing new arrived for over a year until a country music venue opened last. If you moved into Vdara in 2023, you watched a souvenir store, a museum of illusions, and an interactive art installation all attempt to define what this corner was for before anyone opened something built around staying out after the museums close.
What Vdara Never Built For Itself
Part of why that timeline matters to a resident, rather than just a tourist checking a map, is that Vdara has never solved its own food and evening question in-house. The tower opened in December 2009 with exactly one restaurant, Silk Road, serving Mediterranean food, and it closed within two years for lack of demand. What replaced it wasn't another restaurant. Part of the space became meeting rooms, and a Starbucks took the rest in 2013. The building's only real bar, Vice Versa, didn't open in the lobby until 2015, six years after the tower did.
That history is not a knock on the building. Vdara was designed as a non-gaming, non-smoking, dog-friendly alternative to the casino towers around it, and of its 1,495 suites, only around 150 are privately owned residential units, the rest run as hotel inventory. It was built to be quiet, not to be a food hall. But it means residents have always looked next door for the parts of daily life a hotel-condo doesn't provide on its own, and for years, next door was a demolition site and then a mostly daytime retail complex. What opens across Harmon Avenue is not neighborhood color for a Vdara resident. It is closer to an extension of the building's own amenity list.
The Smallest Arrival Changed The Most
By late 2023, 63 CityCenter had size and novelty covered. ARTE MUSEUM's 30,000 square feet dwarfed everything else on the block, and its floor-to-ceiling projection rooms gave the corner a genuine reason to draw daytime foot traffic away from the Strip's usual retail loop. But a museum keeps museum hours. ARTE MUSEUM is open from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. with last admission at 9, and Museum of Illusions runs on a similar daytime clock. Ocean Prime is one steakhouse, not a scene you return to more than occasionally.
What the corner didn't have until Jason Aldean's Kitchen + Bar arrived in late 2024 was anything built around lingering after the day's attractions close. The same development team behind 63 CityCenter, Torino Companies and Flag Luxury Group, runs a similar tenant mix at ICON Park in Orlando, where ARTE MUSEUM and Museum of Illusions also anchor the lineup alongside Blake Shelton's Ole Red. What looks like a one-of-a-kind Strip flagship corner is, underneath, a format this developer has now run in at least two cities, museums and immersive art first, a country music bar last. That doesn't make it less useful to a Vdara resident. It just explains why the corner filled in the way it did: shopping and museums first because they travel well as a format, nightlife last because it's the piece that has to be built for the specific city it lands in.
One Weekend A Year, The Corner Becomes Part Of The Track
There's a detail about this stretch of Las Vegas Boulevard that has nothing to do with retail. The site sits directly on what 63 CityCenter's own site calls the Harmon turn of the Formula 1 Las Vegas Grand Prix, and that same site notes more than fifteen overtakes have happened at that exact turn during past races. For most of the year that's trivia. For one week every November, it means the pavement outside Vdara's front door is functionally part of a closed circuit, with the barriers, grandstands, and foot traffic that come with hosting a turn of an F1 race rather than an ordinary Strip corner. If you've lived here through a Grand Prix week, you already know the corner stops being a place you casually walk through and becomes something closer to an event venue for a few days.
Getting There Without Crossing The Plaza In August
None of this is useful if reaching it means a walk across open concrete at three in the afternoon in late summer. It doesn't have to. Vdara's indoor walkways connect to Aria, and from Aria, pedestrian bridges lead directly into 63 CityCenter, which keeps most of the route indoors and out of direct sun. That's a meaningful detail this time of year, when a five-minute outdoor walk on this stretch of Boulevard in August is not a five-minute walk most people choose twice.
Vdara's own pool deck has a version of this heat problem baked into its architecture. The building's reflective, concave glass exterior concentrates sunlight onto the pool deck badly enough that management installed oversized blue umbrellas and eventually covered the glass in non-reflective film to manage what staff and guests came to call, only half-jokingly, the death ray. The 2026 pool season opened April 3, and the umbrellas are still doing their job. It's a small reminder that living on this stretch of the Strip means understanding which parts of your own building, and which parts of the block around it, were designed with the desert sun in mind and which weren't.
Put together, the last three years didn't just add restaurants and a museum to the view outside your window. They finally gave the corner something to do at every hour, from a coffee run before the museums open to a late set at Aldean's after the Grand Prix crowds thin out, on a stretch of ground that spent years as somebody else's unfinished project before any of it existed.
If you're weighing what a property in this part of the Strip is actually worth to live with day to day, not just what it looks like on a listing sheet, that's the kind of local detail worth having in hand. Brady Luxury Homes works this corridor closely enough to know it. Work With Us when you're ready to talk specifics.
