With high, mural-covered ceilings hung with amber lamps, and giant palm trees lolling next to faux-marble pillars, it's an unexpected oasis in the bustling concrete jungle of downtown.
"Home Sweet Home" is a brilliantly hued, 36-foot-long, 22-foot-high mural that features large colorful shapes layered onto a painted wall.
"I'm afraid of heights," said Francisco, 17, near the top of towering scaffolding as he worked on the 27-foot-high mural.
"There is a colorful, huge, four-wall, cathedral-ceiling-high mural depicting a horse race called the Palio, which is run in a little Tuscany town," said Joe Ferrer, the former executive editor of Time Inc. and a Palio regular.
Inside the balmy 65,000-square-foot water park, built on a 30-acre site, waves pound a beach lined with Adirondack chairs against a ceiling-high mural with a seaside view.
At Mohegan Sun, where the Indian motifs are designed by the company of the theming visionary David Rockwell, the overwhelmed pedestrian is ushered toward the Casino of the Earth by a 20-foot-high mural of a warrior brave materializing from the gnarled root of a tree.
On the south side, at the corner of Thompson Street, the Japan Artists Society has sponsored a building-high mural of two cats, with a city in the background, containing the following announcement: "A pondering feline is melting into the Socratic skyline".
Initially invited to Detroit to take part in a project with realtor Dan Gilbert, Fairey painted murals in the city including a 185ft-high mural on One Campus Martius for Gilbert's Bedrock Real Estate Services, as well as several other smaller pieces.
Two-story-high murals of big blue curling waves provided a backdrop.
