Sin City gets bigger, better

Thousands of people lined the sidewalks of the Las Vegas Strip waiting to get into the newly opened Wynn Las Vegas of casino king Steve Wynn. Picture / Reuters

A casino opening in Las Vegas is not unlike the premiere of a hotly awaited Hollywood film: the frisson of anticipation, the round of exclusive parties, the insistent whispers in the local press of celebrity sightings. More often than not, there are fireworks.

The difference is that new casino resorts in Vegas are much rarer than new movies, the last being the ill-fated Aladdin in 2000. That only heightens the expectations.

And when the man unveiling the casino happens to be Steve Wynn, the undisputed king of the Vegas strip these past 15 years, the universal assumption is that he will show the world something extraordinary - something that will redefine Sin City and the way everyone thinks of it.

Thus it was that all Vegas held its breath last week for the opening of the latest Wynn extravaganza, the almost absurdly opulent Wynn Las Vegas, whose curved glass-and-steel form has been slowly rising from the northern end of the strip for five years. Built for US$2.7 billion ($3.7 billion), it is by far the most expensive casino in the world.

In a town where money talks louder than words, that alone has grabbed everyone's attention.

The crowds were lining up outside the main gates eight hours before the official opening last week.

The local newspaper, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, gushed in admiration every day for a week, going so far as to congratulate Wynn and his wife, Elaine, saying: "You Make Us All Look Good".

Two decades ago, conventional wisdom would have told an entrepreneur like Wynn that he would be insane to attempt a project on such a scale.

In those days, Vegas made the bulk of its living from ordinary middle-class Americans looking for deals on accommodation and food so they could focus on the gambling.

The town was still largely controlled by organised crime syndicates, and not only was Wall Street not involved, it didn't want anything to do with the place.

Wynn has been at the forefront of the movement to change all that, raking in corporate investment on a gargantuan scale and making the slot machines and blackjack tables almost incidental to the other pleasures on offer - the restaurants, shops and the gallery in which he keeps his multi-million-dollar collection of Impressionist masters.

His first mega-resort, the Mirage, was almost universally predicted to fail when it opened in 1988. It was built for the then unheard-of cost of US$600 million but it made money from the first day and Vegas has been on a non-stop building boom ever since.

The southern end of the strip, in particular, is now clustered with mega-resorts - some exotic (the Luxor and the Excalibur) and some imitating the great cities of the world (New York-New York, Paris and the Venetian).

At one point in the 1990s, Vegas seemed to be on the way to becoming a Disneyland-style resort for families and children, with Wynn's Treasure Island casino, featuring pirate ships clashing on a lake outside, acting as the centrepiece.

The September 11 attacks and the dip in tourist traffic that followed put paid to this dubious idea, though, and soon the town was luring visitors back with the kinds of things it had always promised: raunch, transgression and sin without guilt.

Wynn's new vision is to shoot for the absolute top end of the market. He first experimented with that idea when he opened the US$1.6 billion mock-Italian Bellagio in 1998.

The experiment suffered an unfortunate hiatus two years later when Wynn allowed himself to stretch his assets too thinly and lost his Mirage Resorts empire to a hostile takeover from Kirk Kerkorian of MGM.

Almost straight away, though, he snapped up the property that has now become Wynn Las Vegas and put together a consortium of investors (including Japanese businessman Kozuo Okada) to build the first of what he intends to be a series of resorts on the site of the old Rat Pack haunt, the Desert Inn.

Why is this working? How come the tourists continue to flock to Vegas - a record 38 million of them last year, with even more forecast this year - when casino gambling has been legalised in more states than not? The answer, which Wynn appears to have anticipated, is that Vegas remains the mecca for gamblers and self-indulgent all-night entertainment-seekers. And if it's going to be special in people's imaginations, it certainly doesn't do any harm to be special in reality, too.

Wynn Las Vegas

* The casino cost US$2.7 billion to build. On opening night, people lined up for eight hours to see: An 18-storey man-made mountain and waterfall.

* Luxury restaurants.

* An on-site Ferrari dealership.

* A gallery of designer stores.

- INDEPENDENT