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The Jockey Club is a nearly 30-year-old 270-unit timeshare tower right next to (just south of) Bellagio. It bills itself as "the only all-suite non-casino resort on the Las Vegas Strip." It has a 24-hour heated swimming pool, a fitness center and tennis courts, and a mini-mart.
It's not so much MGM Mirage's CityCenter that's impacting the quality of accommodations at the Jockey Club these days; it's the Cosmopolitan, which is rising between the Jockey Club and MGM Mirage's metaresort.
The $1.8 billion 3,000-room Cosmopolitan, when completed, will boast two 60-story glass towers with 2,000 condos and 1,000 hotel rooms that will be managed by the Grand Hyatt. In addition, the Cosmo will feature a 75,000-square-foot casino, a convention center, spa, and mid-size mall. The Cosmo Beach Club will be a five-acre pool deck overlooking the Strip. It's scheduled to open in the third quarter of 2008.
The Cosmo is being built on a small (8.5-acre) site that nearly surrounds and totally towers over the Jockey Club. You can see this, to a certain extent, now that the Cosmo has begun going up (for the past year, the construction has mostly been going down, digging Cosmo's 3,800-space underground parking garage). The fact that the Cosmopolitan will nearly enclose the southern wall of the Jockey Club is now visible. The megaresort's developers have agreed to incorporate some kind of decorative design on its northern wall to give Jockey Club guests in south-facing units something to look at, besides a wall.
Some of the acreage that the Cosmo occupies used to be the Jockey Club's surface parking lot. Today, when you stay at the timeshare, your car is valet-parked on land provided by the Cosmopolitan; when the megaresort is completed, Jockey Club guests will park in a dedicated portion of the Cosmopolitan's underground garage.
For the past year, Cosmopolitan construction has been making life at the Jockey Club a little noisy, dusty, and hectic; this will continue for the next year and a half or so. However, if you can fade the inconveniences, its prime location, expansive timeshare units (two-room suites that can accommodate four comfortably and up to six, with a fully equipped kitchen), and reasonable prices make it one of the great deals on the center Strip. And there's every reason to believe that when the Cosmo and CityCenter next door are completed, it'll continue to be.
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