OffshoreInsiders Handicapping Blog

Las Vegas always has been a city built on hopes and aspirations but only a handful of true visionaries have had a unique and lasting impact of the growth and direction of this desert outpost. Of the four pillars of Las Vegas innovation, Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, Howard Hughes and Liberace are gone but one architect remains, a man who continues to reinvent this unique city to this day.

Part 4: The Man Who Reinvigorated Las Vegas.

Steve Wynn was still a couple of years shy of becoming a teenager in 1952 when he stood on a dusty patch of desert highway called the Strip and listened intently as his father, a Maryland bingo parlor operator, told him of his dream of expanding his business there. Michael Wynn died in 1963 but his dream - and then some - never left the mind of his innovative son. It would take 26 years but Steve Wynn would realize his father’s dream.

Typically, Wynn’s first steps into gaming weren’t timid ones. In the early 1970s, using money he’d earned in the family business, Wynn purchased a parcel of real estate adjacent to Caesars Palace from Howard Hughes. The next year he sold the land to Caesars for a profit of $760,000. He used the money to accumulate stock in the downtown Golden Nugget and, by 1973, at the age of 31, was the youngest casino chairman in the history of Las Vegas.

Wynn next turned his attention to Atlantic City, paying $8.5 million for the Strand Hotel. He promptly demolished the Strand and built another Golden Nugget which, in 1987, he then sold to Bally’s for a record $440 million.

Flushed with optimism and with his father’s dream still kicking around in his head, Wynn then returned to Las Vegas, a city which, despite its gaming persona, still was in search of an identity. Wynn defined it.

He did it by building The Mirage, a $630 million all-inclusive complex that he promised “would have mystique, like a lady half-dressed.” It did.

The birth of The Mirage in 1989 redefined Las Vegas as the ultimate tourist destination, the home of wondrous new sights and experiences, where casino gambling and sports betting were the main but not the only attractions. A tropic paradise of waterfalls and foliage, luxury accommodations, gourmet restaurants, a rain forest, an exploding volcano, a swanky shopping mall, rare white tigers, an aquarium with bottle-nosed dolphins, and the city’s most spectacular - and expensive - show, Siegfried & Roy, there never had been anything quite like it. In fact, Wynn was forced to add a new term to the gaming lexicon just to describe The Mirage. He called it a “megaresort.”

Suddenly, the Strip, which had not seen significant growth in several years, was awash in megaresort projects. In the eight years immediately after Wynn first unveiled his plans to build The Mirage, other would-be entrepreneurs played follow-the-leader, adding 30,000 rooms and $3 billion worth of investments to the Strip.

The success of The Mirage spawned the Excalibur, the castle-configured casino with 4,000 rooms. Then came Luxor, a pyramid-shaped property next door to the Excalibur. Hardly content to watch others build, in October of 1993, Wynn added another property of his own, Treasure Island, a pirate-themed facility adjacent to The Mirage. Two months later the city welcomed the MGM Grand, with 5,005 rooms, the largest hotel, er, megaresort, in the world.

Wynn would later build Bellagio, on the site of the old Dunes Hotel on the corner of Flamingo Road and Las Vegas Boulevard and, most recently, Wynn Las Vegas, his high-end signature property that now stands on land where the Desert Inn once stood.

”Nevada’s advantage is... that we have the creative genius of people like Steve,” said former Governor Bob Miller.

Wynn, the architect of the modern Las Vegas gaming and sports betting expansion, just smiled at the remark, comfortable with the presence (and accolades) of elected officials. In fact, Wynn has golfed with many politicians, including Arizona Senator Sen. John McCain, the presumptive 2008 presidential nominee of the Republican Party.

So how did it feel to rub elbows with the power elite?

McCain never said.