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Comment by pimlottc | Hacker News Reader

> I am having trouble seeing the 4-6 windows combined from the photos of the Bellagio. The close up does not help.

You can see it better in this high-res photo from Wikimedia Commons [0]. Each of the square windows appears to span four rooms on two floors, while the lower floor rectangular windows appear to span three floors, making it six rooms.

0: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bellagio_hotel.jpg

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Do the windows span multiple floors?

Yeah. What looks like 1 window from the outside is actually 4 windows for four rooms, two below and two above. The scale is hard to get a sense of but those subwindows are quite wide floor-to-ceiling windows in each of those rooms (at least in Treasure Island’s case; I’d assume others are similar).

That’s why it shrinks the apparent visual scale of the hotel, which has twice as many floors and twice as many rooms per floor as it seems from the “window” frames outside.

A lot of things about the Strip in Vegas, deliberately or not, really throw your sense of scale off. "Oh it's just the next hotel over, how far can it be?" A ways it turns out.

Totally. “Ah just over there no problem”.

30 minutes later…

That is the absolute worst. You walk halfway there and it looks exactly as far away as when you started.

We watched Penn and Teller at the Rio. You look at a map, see its a block over from the strip, no problem. You walk out your hotel room and see the giant Rio sign, totally fine look how close it is!

20 minutes later you stare in horror at the same sign wondering how it hasn't gotten an inch closer to you.

I had the exact opposite experience in really dense cities funnily, you look at a map and see dozens of streets between you and where you're going, and it seems like it's half a city away. In reality it's just a 15 minute walk.

Yeah, depends on what you're used to. I've grown up in fairly dense cities so I was not expecting the density of the strip.

It doesn't help that there's nothing in between the Rio and the rest of the strip. I've gone up and down the strip before and there's at least things to keep you occupied for those distances. But seeing nothing but that stupid sign is hell.

Had this experience recently in Kyoto, where it was amazing how "far" you could walk in 20-30 minutes, in a city designed for walking.

How are you getting "a block over" from the map? Just because almost no streets go through there doesn't make it a block! The strip hotels, especially those on the west side, are several blocks deep (counting their parking lots) themselves, then there's a dead zone of the freeway, then the multiple blocks of the Rio. There's little room there for practical streets although in most places there's one street behind the casinos.

The point is that someone accustomed to regular city downtowns is used to ordinary city blocks and hotels that sit within a block. A quick glance at a map doesn't really communicate the scale of the casinos on the strip or the distance you need to walk to get from one to the other in many cases.

(It's not all that bad. The Venetian really is more or less across from the Mirage and Caesar's Palace is then reasonably close.)

Is that really how "city blocks" are supposed to be modelled? AFAIK a "block" is one atomic unit of a particular grid of city streets — and a city can have multiple such grids, with different block sizes. Like a computer with disks with different block sizes. It's my impression that the Las Vegas strip forms its own distinct grid, with very large blocks.

No. The Strip doesn't have a separate grid. Rather, it has many objects which occupy multiple grid cells. I'm looking at the Strip and surround on Google as I write this--and it is completely clear that the Strip properties are far above normal city blocks. (Admittedly, I'm a backcountry hiker and thus more used to map reading than your typical city dweller that always uses Google or the like.)

Since when is there a standardized distance for a "block"? My entire point is that one block (ie. the distance between two streets perpendicular to the one you are on) is much larger on the strip than in a regular city.

Going down Flamingo, the only intersection between the Bellagio and the Rio is I15. You could say maybe a block and a half, but that's still nowhere close to 30 minutes' walk.

When you have objects far bigger than a typical city block of course you have few streets. That's your fault in map reading, not anything deceptive about the city.

Considering how several people have anecdotally also had the same problem, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that my and everyone else's map reading skills are just fine.

> not anything deceptive about the city.

The entire purpose of the strip is to be deceptive, so it's hilarious that this is even an argument.

Sorry that you're so defensive when minor criticisms are levied against a stretch of road in your city. It's certainly a weird hill to die on, but you do you.

The reason for this is the same reason they employ the window trick in the headline: the properties on the strip are enormous, scaled completely outside most people's day-to-day experience; the Bellagio property, for instance, covers 77 acres and has just shy of 4000 rooms.

This is the scale that you need to wrap you mind around. The maps are deceiving. Stayed recently at Park MGM to attend conference at Aria. They share the same physical "Block" so it appears they are close. It still took 30 minutes of walking through connecting hallways and up and down escalators to traverse between the two hotels/casinos.

And it's worse if you want to cover distance that is at odds with where you are intended to go. e.g., from oversized parking behind casinos. You end up walking on roads without footpaths/sidewalks, climbing up/around service docks, etc.

The strip has always reminded me of the old western towns (at least, in movies) where there is a high street of grand facades, but it's chaos behind.

That place was not meant for humans to exist in it. At least not at the scale it happens right now.

It's car sized, much of American signage and affordances are designed to be viewed from your car at speed.

No one is driving down the Las Vegas Strip at speed.

It's about a certain type of spectacle.

It’s not really any different from other places that require environmental support to make it livable (e.g. New York).

The only reason Las Vegas even has water issues is because of water rights, not anything that makes it inherently worse than the rest of the southwest.

Its proximity to the Colorado river arguably makes it inherently better than most of the rest of the southwest

I always blow away my step goal in Vegas, and that's even though I spend at least 4 hours a day at the tables.

It’s quite easy to imagine if you combine the inside shots for the rooms[1] with the outside one.

1: https://bellagio.mgmresorts.com/en/hotel.html

Zoom in on the wikimedia commons high-res one (thanks for that high res link!), and then look at the balconies in the middle column of the building. See the door in the balcony? Each of those four-window blocks is two stories high. Which means each "pane" is pretty big -- others have said each of those four-window blocks is actually four hotel rooms.

The picture in the OP didn't make it totally clear, which left me wondering too, although I figured that's what they meant so it must be that way -- the fact that we have to look so carefully to verify it, I guess shows the success of the "illusion"!

Also there's only a balcony every other floor, again fooling the casual observer into seeing one floor where there's two.

That’s so odd, so the floor above can look down into the balcony below

Also handily enabling price differentiation and therefore improving profitability...

Thank you!!

Each of the square windows appears to span four rooms on two floors, while the lower floor rectangular windows appear to spam three floors, making it six rooms.

Yes, it's easier to tell in night time photos:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fe/Las_Vega...

Thank you! I couldn't see what the article was telling me I should from the photo the author used. This photo makes it very clear how the windows are designed.

That makes it far more obvious, cheers :)

And a fun hack would be people on the upper floors making every version of a Tetris piece by turning on or off lights in the appropriate room :-)

Yes. A comment on the post points to the TASS building in Moscow, which nicely illustrates this trick at a smaller scale: https://discovermoscow.com/en/places/dostoprimechatelnosti/z... — at first glance and from a distance it seems to have four floors. But it has nine, as is clear if you look more closely or compare nearby buildings (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/Moscow_T... is the same image).

Yes, it is a bit hard to tell from his photos but obvious when you are there in real life.

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