The state is overseeing a $1.1 million landscape project at the intersection at Interstate 15 and Sahara Avenue, adding color and tying in to an overall face lift in the area.
The project also fits in with a campaign to beautify the major concrete and asphalt corridors used by tourists and locals in the Las Vegas Valley and across the state, using as a model the work done in such cities as Phoenix and Tucson.
"We had a lot of people complaining we weren't doing enough for beautification," said Rudy Malfabon, the Department of Transportation deputy director in Southern Nevada.
In response, he said, the state created a program to split costs for landscaping major intersections, as well as a recently adopted requirement that 3 percent of a project costs go to trees, rocks, stamped concrete and other aesthetic elements.
The project at I-15 and Sahara includes work on all four corners, and ties in to renovations that have begun or are planned in two of the quadrants, viewed by thousands of people every day.
The Palace Station sprawls on the southwest corner, and on the northwest the Sahara Rancho Corp. is adding to an office complex on 15 acres. Across the street from that work is the high-rise US Bank building, which itself is undergoing a $300,000 landscaping project.
On the other side of the freeway, on the southeast corner of I-15 and Sahara, the Artisan Hotel is planning a renovation, to include more landscaping around its property.
David Poire, director of corporate affairs at the Artisan Hotel and Spa, said he's been to several meetings about the project, including discussions about coordinating the state program with his company's work. He said the work will help dress up the drab slab of gravel and concrete at the intersection and help establish what he called the "gateway to Las Vegas" -- Sahara and I-15.
"We're trying to become a one-of-a-kind property for Las Vegas, a small nongaming boutique-style property," Poire said. "We've got a proposal from Meadow Valley (the state landscape contractor) sitting on a desk. We have not acted on it yet but we're definitely leaning toward contributing."
Melba Buday, property manager with the Sahara Rancho Corp., said the state project will fit in with the $9 million development her company has started.
While downtown is the focus of the city's urban renewal efforts, the geographic center of the valley is a broad area, and includes such landlocked neighborhoods as the Sahara-Rancho area. Public investment, even in ways like landscaping, often tie in -- purposely or not -- to other efforts under way.
"Now we've got the foundation for the building we did the groundbreaking on (in early October)," Buday said. The project call for 20 date palms, 188 acacia, mondel pine and other trees, 1,076 shrubs in 5-gallon containers, 422 person-sized decorative boulders and stamped concrete retaining walls. The job started in July and is scheduled to finish in spring, Malfabon said.
Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman -- who was at the Sahara Rancho office complex groundbreaking and hailed it as an example of infill development needed for the urban center of the city -- said the landscaping was sorely needed.
"I had to beg and plead" for three years to get the project going, Goodman said.
The mayor has used his bully pulpit to promote the idea of public aesthetics -- from a percent-for-art proposal just introduced to City Council, to the "Oscar's River" downtown meander.
While the percent-for-art proposal deals with placing artwork -- typically murals and sculpture, although it could take other forms -- on public projects such as new buildings, it's part of the same impulse that drives the idea of landscaping roads.
Chuck Twardy, a freelance art and architecture critic who has written about public aesthetics, said "it's crucial to have some enhancement of the public realm."
"Generally highways are the most utilitarian and bare and sparse public works you can get," Twardy said. "Anything that helps to relieve the tedium of it, particularly around an interchange, which really is an interruption of urban vitality in a way, it's a good thing."
Twardy said money is the major reason it's not done more often -- that, and the function of engineering as a bottom-line, get-the-job done effort, as opposed to an endeavor that includes artistic elements.
"Look back on great public works in the Depression, when they really didn't have any money, " Twardy said. "They went through a lot of trouble to add art deco touches to enhance the public realm -- to the Hoover Dam, as a matter of fact. It's not that hard to do if (builders) start thinking of it as integral to the design and planning process."
The valley does have some major highway corridors with aesthetic features built in, including the area around I-15 and Interstate 215 and the McCarran Airport entrances, the bridges that cross I-215 at Summerlin, and the stamped concrete bridges that cross U.S. 95 at Rainbow and at Durango. Malfabon said neither bridge is painted, and both will be when the work on the Rainbow bridge is complete in two years.
The city of Las Vegas also paid for treatment of the Tropical Pass Parkway bridge over U.S. 95, and Debbi Ackerman, spokeswoman for the city's Public Works Department, said the city has landscaped Fourth Street, and will add landscaping to a $5.4 million project on Stewart Avenue from Main Street to Maryland Parkway due to start late next year.
Other projects listed on the Nevada Department of Transportation books include the $17.4 million interchange at Lamb and I-15 in North Las Vegas. Bidding commenced in November, and landscaping is estimated to be $420,000 of that, according to numbers provided by the transportation department.
Malfabon said the interchange at Lamb Boulevard in North Las Vegas has "palm trees, the Thunderbirds integrated in the bridge aesthetics. The city of North Las Vegas has a Stealth bomber in the city logo, and that's formed into the concrete bridge. It reflects their community."
archive