The MGM Grand opened in 1993 at the southern end of the Strip and remains one of the largest hotels in the world, with somewhere above five thousand rooms. The green glass, the lion at the door and the scale are what most visitors remember.
One thing has to be said at the start, because it is still the most common reason people come. The lion habitat closed in 2012. There are no longer live lions in the MGM Grand, and anyone wanting to see the animals that were in it has to drive to Henderson.
For nearly twenty years a glass-walled enclosure off the casino floor held a rotating group of lions, brought in each day from a ranch outside the city and taken back at night. Admission was free and it was, for a great many visitors, the thing they remembered about Las Vegas.
It closed in 2012. The animals went permanently to the Lion Habitat Ranch in Henderson, about twenty minutes south-east of the Strip, which is open to the public and where the same lions — and their descendants — can still be seen, with considerably more space and considerably fewer slot machines. Accounts that describe the habitat as a current attraction of the hotel are fourteen years out of date.
Worth untangling, because there have been two. The original MGM Grand opened in 1973 further north on the Strip; it was sold in 1986 and became Bally's Las Vegas — which was itself renamed the Horseshoe Las Vegas in 2022, so accounts referring to "what is now Bally's" are pointing at a name that has also gone.
The present MGM Grand is a different building on a different site, completed in 1993, and when it opened it was the largest hotel in the world.
Several attractions that older accounts list have closed: the Studio 54 nightclub went in 2012, the La Femme revue earlier still, and the CBS Television City screening attraction has also gone. The nightclub space has changed hands more than once since. As everywhere in Las Vegas, the venues inside a resort turn over far faster than the resort itself.
It is sometimes written that Las Vegas has evolved into a family destination. The opposite happened. The city marketed itself to families during the early 1990s — which is the period this hotel was built in, and why it originally had a theme park attached — and then abandoned the strategy around the turn of the century in favour of adults. The theme park is long gone, under-21s may not linger on a gaming floor, and the city's advertising has been aimed squarely at adults for twenty-five years.
At the southern end of the Strip, on the corner of Tropicana Avenue, with the Tropicana site opposite now a building plot for the Athletics' ballpark. The monorail runs from here to the northern end of the Strip, which makes it a more practical base than the distance suggests.
The other resorts are under Las Vegas hotels; general practicalities on the Las Vegas page.