VEGAS: DESERT SHOPPING MECCA SPENDING'S TAKING THE PLACE OF GAMBLING AS NEW CENTERS OPEN, HOTELS BRANCH OUT.

Byline: Tracie Rozhon Staff Writer

LAS VEGAS - Construction of shopping centers has slowed to a crawl in the rest of the country, but not in Las Vegas, where shopping has become the fastest-growing game in a gambling town.

Developers are building 1 million square feet of shopping space along the Strip, to sell everything from T-shirts to $1,000 Hermes riding boots, and planning an additional half-million square feet. And that's on top of the endless corridors of pseudo-souks, Venetian alleys and Roman forums erected over the past decade.

Most of the country's shopping center developers are not building any new ones, said Anthony Deering, chief executive for the Rouse Co., which has developed 52 malls around the United States. ``We're down to maybe one a year - right now, that's a lot,'' he said.

Yet the Rouse Co. is investing grandly in Las Vegas, betting $1 billion that its renovation of the city's aging Fashion Show mall will pay off. On Nov. 1, Rouse will begin the first phase of the mall's expansion, more than doubling the square footage and adding new anchor stores, a high-tech fashion runway and the Strip's latest gimmick: an enormous wire-mesh sculpture that hangs over the sidewalk and doubles as a laser video screen at night. When completed, the Fashion Show project will boast the most anchor stores in the country, eight, compared with the Mall of America's five.

Another shopping haunt, the Forum at Caesars Palace, is being enlarged by more than 40 percent and will extend right down to the Strip by the end of 2003. Across from Fashion Show, casino impresario Steve Wynn will add even more space at his new project, Le Reve, including the Strip's first auto dealership, selling Maseratis and Ferraris. Mandalay Bay, another new resort, is more than tripling its shopping space and has signed up Louis Vuitton and Fendi.

For the developers, it's a big gamble. The more than 1.5 million square feet under construction and planned would increase retail space on the Strip by about 50 percent. Some economists and other retail analysts worry that Las Vegas is already ``over-stored,'' as they word it.

The developers, who proved earlier fears wrong, say there's still room for more. Mandalay Bay's president said Las Vegas is the only city in the United States that is ``under-retailed,'' as he put it. Developers have chosen to buck the national mood of retail despair because, they say, Las Vegas has a unique confluence of circumstances, including the fastest- growing population in the country, desert sunshine, low taxes, a low crime rate and - even though they don't say it - the gambling.

But gambling, while still by far the biggest money-maker in Vegas, is no longer where all the action is. The old gamblers' hangouts - the Sands, the Dunes, the Hacienda, the old Aladdin and the Desert Inn - where Sammy, Frank and Dino reigned as kings, are gone now, some imploded, and were replaced by the 3 million square feet of modern retail space built since the early 1990s: mock palaces with Disneyesque-themed ``environments'' for shopping and dining.

To lure ever more shoppers, casino advertisements now play up the boutiques and play down the roulette wheels. A full-page advertisement for Caesars Palace in an airline magazine calls it a place ``where you will adorn yourself in the haute couture of Gucci, Escada, Armani and more,'' then talks about the rooms, the ``pool oasis'' and the night life. Mentioned last is the casino. Another full-page advertisement for Caesars in a tourist brochure does not even mention gambling. It promises: ``Shoppus til You Droppus.''

Perhaps the surest sign that Las Vegas is changing how it does business is that, in the newer hotel-casinos, shoppers no longer must pass by the slot machines on their way to the boutiques. The shopping promenades at Desert Passage (with its endless Moroccan passages), the Paris (complete with Eiffel Tower), the Bellagio (with colored fountains) and the Venetian (where singing gondoliers ply man-made canals) all have their own entrances.

And, now, cars. Wynn, who sold Bellagio and the Mirage to MGM Grand, is coming back on the site of the old Desert Inn, where he has already erected a piece of his new $3 billion hotel and retail project. Le Reve will combine the Maserati-Ferrari dealership with more predictable Italian leather and bespoke tailoring shops.

Fred Leighton, the high-end Madison Avenue jeweler, says he never would have considered opening a store in Las Vegas - until Wynn started tempting him with the Bellagio, which opened in 1998. Before then, jewelry in Las Vegas often consisted of selling gamblers a horseshoe-shaped pin with mediocre diamonds, for less than $5,000. ``Now, they think nothing of buying a half-million-dollar antique emerald necklace,'' Leighton said. ``And they buy when they win - and when they lose.''

When they lose?

``They want to show their wives that even though they lost, their lifestyle will remain the same,'' he said with a laugh. ``That way, the wives will let them keep gambling.''

According to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, the average amount each tourist spends on shopping - $106 - is still far less than the $607 tourists say they budget for gambling. But the amount people spend on shopping has grown almost 50 percent in the past five years, while the gambling number has grown only 18 percent.

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2 photos

Photo:

(1) Shoppers admire one of two elephants at the entrance to Endangered Species in the Desert Passage Mall at the Aladdin Resort and Casino in Las Vegas.

(2) At the Venetian, visitors can combine shopping with a gondola ride through the retail area not far from the casino.

Dean Musgrove/Staff Photographer