Urban Living in California

IntelligentTraveler.com

Las Vegas is the last place you’d ever expect to go green. A dizzying buffet of high-rise hotels, boisterous tourists, casinos, clubs, and lights flashing all around, the city of sin is hardly a picture of eco-friendliness.

The CityCenter—the newest addition to the Strip—promises to change this, however. A 76-acre city-within-a-city, the CityCenter will house hotels and residences, restaurants, and a $40 million public fine art program. Currently under construction and scheduled to open its centerpiece building, Aria, by the end of 2009, the CityCenter is destined to be one of the world’s largest environmentally sustainable urban communities. Inhabitat reports that the CityCenter is the largest privately financed development in the history of North America vying for U.S. Green Building Council’s (USGBC) LEED certification. Indeed, the Center is slated to span 18 million square feet, which Inhabitat says is more square footage than all of the existing LEED-certified buildings combined.

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Traveler invited HotelChatter senior editor Juliana Shallcross to share her favorite San Francisco hotels in September’s cover story, “Classic San Francisco.”  Juliana revealed some gems, including the Hotel Vitale, which she describes as a “small but elegant 199-room property on the Embarcadero, the city’s traditional waterfront.” When booking, she says, request a room overlooking the water. “The Bay Bridge views are great. And there are free yoga classes, too.”

Another reason to like the Vitale: It belongs to the Joie de Vivre hotel group, which aims to donate a minimum of $200 per guest room per year to community organizations. Hotel Vitale’s philanthropic partner is the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, whose members and volunteers build trails, restore wetlands, propagate and plant thousands of native species, study hawk migration, and bring 15,000 schoolchildren to the Parks each year for educational programs. Hotel guests can help by donating one dollar of their total bill to Joie de Vivre’s “You Can Make a Difference” program.

One more plus: The Hotel Vitale is located within walking distance of a wide variety of public transportation, including BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit), the historic waterfront trolleys, ferries to the North and East Bay, cable cars and Muni (San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency).

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The owner of the historic theater is looking for a buyer or a partner. By Roger Vincent, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

A downtown Los Angeles theater that has hosted some of the biggest names in entertainment since the 1920s but struggled in recent decades is once again in search of a white knight — one who could pay $12.5 million to buy it.

The Variety Arts Center was purchased in early 2007 by the former owner of the Pasadena Playhouse, David Houk, who hoped to stage plays and musicals in the historic five-story building at Figueroa and Ninth streets.

But Houk was unable to secure the federal tax credits he had hoped would help fund restoration and operation, he said, so now he must sell it or find a new partner willing to buy into his dream of bringing the old stage back to life.

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