Deep inside the most expensive privately funded construction project in American history is, of course, a buffet. It’s the Strip, so that’s to be expected. But this isn’t just any old buffet.

In fact, MGM Mirage CEO Jim Murren likes to dub it his “Bull Market Buffet.” It is a lavishly designed space with green glass-tile walls, imported bamboo flooring, and a high-tech lighting package that's “three or four times what you’d ordinarily spend on lighting in a buffet.”

The buffet, like the rest of the ambitious $8.5 billion effort, was conceived and designed in a different era. That era, however, did not survive the construction phase. As CityCenter begins opening with the 1,495-unit hotel-condominium Vdara today, the 500,000-square-foot Crystals shopping district on Thursday, and the posh 57-story Mandarin Oriental on Friday, it is being greeted by a tourist sector slow to recover from an economic devastation the likes of which hubristic Vegas has never endured.

“We have this fabulous place, and we’re going to open it into probably the softest LV environment since I came to Las Vegas on my first trip in 1969,” said Bobby Baldwin, the 58-year-old executive who oversaw construction and will operate a complex that also includes a 4,004-room Aria hotel and casino and a pair of 37-story, tilted, yellow-checkered condo buildings called Veer. (To read more about Baldwin and his rise from being a poker pro to CityCenter honcho, click here.)

The concept that visitor volume would plummet to 2000 levels in 2009 or that major investment houses would collapse and threaten to halt construction were not even imaginable back in 2004 when Murren rolled into Bellagio president Baldwin’s office to share a bubble diagram. In it, the last undeveloped expanse of land at the heart of the Strip would bloom into a cluster of high-rises that included thousands of residences, as well as retail, gambling, and hotel amenities.

The economic challenges didn’t really hit home for CityCenter until the past year, but there were plenty of other issues. Another hotel-condo building, an oval blue-green tower known as The Harmon, was originally to have 48 floors but was shorn to 27 and delayed a year because of improper rebar installation. The upside: The condos were eliminated ,which is good because only half of the others at CityCenter are reserved, and it’s anyone’s guess how many of those will close.

On Baldwin’s watch, too, were six workers who died in construction accidents, deaths that led the muckraking Las Vegas Sun to win a Pulitzer Prize for exposing troubling safety conditions and lax regulatory oversight. Baldwin was never personally implicated in any wrongdoing, but many believe MGM Mirage’s hurried construction schedule was part of why general contractor Perini felt the itch to overlook certain guidelines.

The project itself nearly died several times too. The cost escalated from its initial $5 billion estimate to $8.5 billion because of higher-than-expected labor, materials, and fuel expenses, so MGM Mirage took on joint-venture partner Dubai World. Yet in late March, Dubai World balked, suing MGM Mirage and refusing to put up its portion of debt-service payments. A month of marathon negotiations ensued in which Murren, a former top-ranked equity trader who by then had replaced Terry Lanni as CEO, took most of the credit for orchestrating the deals to keep the project—and the company—out of bankruptcy, Dubai World in the fold, and the banks lending.