3/8/2024
Discovering The Smith Center
When asked about his favorite visits to The Smith Center, Don Snyder says that includes every time he steps foot inside.
“I end up watching the (audience) as much as I watch the performances,” says Snyder, Smith Center Board Chairman. “I like to see the reactions people have when they’re in the facility.”
It’s no wonder Snyder feels emotional about The Smith Center, as he devoted roughly 20 years to helping fundraise, plan and construct it.
Stepping down this year as chairman, while remaining on the board, Snyder now reflects on the greatest turning points during the long road to creating The Smith Center.
“(The Smith Center) is the culmination of nearly a quarter century of meticulous planning, hard work, unwavering passion for the end goal, and certainly some good karma,” he says.
A Meeting of Visionaries
Snyder remembers a watershed moment at the Golden Nugget in 1994.
A group of community leaders gathered for a “call-to-action” meeting, which ignited the decades-long effort to create The Smith Center.
Snyder, present as a prominent business leader, still remembers the line spoken there that resonated with him: “Las Vegas is the largest community in North America that doesn’t have its own world-class performing arts center, and we need to change that.”
Reflecting on his past difficulties with recruiting executives to move to Las Vegas, Snyder knew he wanted to play a major role in this project.
“The typical reaction (of recruits I targeted) was, ‘You want us to move where?’” Snyder says. “Las Vegas didn’t have a lot of those things that older communities had, and a performing arts center and cultural infrastructure was certainly a large part of those missing pieces.”
A Historic Donation
Raising $470 million for the project proved a tremendous undertaking, involving crucial public and private support.
The Reynolds Foundation made the center’s opening possible, with contributions totaling one of the largest performing-arts donations in U.S. history.
Snyder still remembers his meeting in 2005 with foundation Chairman Fred Smith, to discuss the project team’s request for substantial support.
Smith initially had Snyder worried, declaring that the team had made “a pretty bold request.”
But then Smith revealed the foundation would donate $50 million – later supplemented with another $100 million – in addition to Smith personally donating $1 million.
“Then Fred, for one of the few times I ever saw him laugh, rolled his head back, had a big laugh, and said, ‘Ha, now I bet you wish you’d asked for more,’” Snyder recalls.
Choosing The Heart of Downtown
Another pivotal moment came with selecting where to build The Smith Center, Snyder adds. 
While some supporters pushed for Summerlin, Snyder and the rest of the board felt strongly about downtown Las Vegas.
“It seemed patently obvious to us and (then-mayor Jan Jones) that it needed to be a community asset, and accessible to the whole community,” Snyder says.
When he first walked through the proposed downtown site (previously Union Pacific property), he saw nothing “but remnants of a railyard and bad-looking soil,” he recalls.
Fortunately, the City of Las Vegas committed both to donating the land and providing environmental remediation.
By building The Smith Center there, Snyder notes, the team hoped it would promote “broad-based” downtown development.
“We needed to drop a big enough pebble in the water to create real economic energy,” he says. “The Smith Center would do that.”
Opening a World-Class Facility
Snyder easily recalls his favorite moment of The Smith Center’s glittering opening-night concert in March 2012.
In between performances by the all-star lineup, Snyder stepped onstage with Smith and Myron Martin, the center’s president and CEO. Snyder saw his 4-year-old granddaughter in the audience throw him a kiss.
“I threw her a kiss back, and I joke that 400 women threw a kiss back at me,” Snyder chuckles. “That experience with my granddaughter was very special.”
Also special, he notes, was when prestigious Pollstar Magazine named The Smith Center among the top 10 performing arts centers in the world.
“That’s a tremendous achievement,” he says. “One of the things that motivated me from the very beginning was helping to build infrastructure for a world-class city, and (creating The Smith Center) was building the cultural part of that infrastructure.”
*Picture one left to right: Fred Smith, Steven Anderson, Don Snyder and Myron Martin.
*Picture two: Don Snyder with his wife Dee, their daughter Christy and their granddaughter Zaine, flanked by two ballerinas, at The Smith Center’s opening-night celebration in 2012.