Rising in front of you is a half-scale replica of the Eiffel Tower, because you are in Las Vegas and of course you are. Paris Las Vegas opened in September 1999 and featured not only the tower but replicas of the Arc de Triomphe, the Paris Opera House, the Louvre, and the Hôtel de Ville, all crammed together on a Strip-side footprint that would fit comfortably inside a single Parisian city block. The scale compression required is so extreme that the Tower replica's legs are planted inside the hotel-casino building.
The Gustave Eiffel Company, which manages the original tower's intellectual property, licensed the design and reportedly provided access to the original construction drawings, which is why the replica's iron latticework is more accurate than you might expect from a Las Vegas knockoff. The observation deck sits 460 feet above the Strip and offers spectacular views of the Bellagio fountains directly across the street — the same fountains that are themselves visible from the observation deck, in a vertiginous hall-of-mirrors effect where Las Vegas spectacles observe each other.
The themed resort era that Paris Las Vegas represents reached its peak in the late 1990s and then faded as the luxury era supplanted it. New York-New York, Excalibur, Luxor, Caesars Palace, Paris — all built fantasy worlds from the blueprints of existing places. The implicit promise was that you could see the world without going to it. In retrospect, the promise was truer than anyone intended.