Word: casino
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...gathering global gale, with 3,000 of the highest-priced rooms in Vegas and something like $300 million worth of works of art nailed to its mast. All bought, over a little more than two years, by Stephen A. Wynn, 56, who had never collected anything except casino real estate and golf courses before--and who is, moreover, gradually losing his sight to retinitis pigmentosa, an irreversible, degenerative eye disease...
...simulation, quotation, weird unconvincing displacements, in which cultural icons are endlessly but never convincingly quoted. Here is the Luxor Hotel, that huge silly pyramid with its plaster Anubises and fiber-glass Amon-Ras, its cavernous interior housing a facsimile of the Manhattan skyline. Here, under construction, is a casino in the form of the Doges Palace in Venice, complete with a small-scale version of the Campanile bearing a replica of the original's gilded angel on its vertex. Here too is Caesars Palace, looking like the architectural dream of an illiterate Mussolini; and alongside it are the Forum Shops...
Never mind that Wall Street is wobbly, that Asia's gamblers are currency shocked or that most Americans are already no more than a tank of gas away from the nearest blackjack table. Las Vegas is on a $7 billion building jag, with 18 major hotel and casino projects scheduled to open before 2000. By the millennium, Vegas will have more rooms than New York City, Paris or Los Angeles and more slots than the U.S. Postal Service...
...again, the Mob's former desert stopover is on the remake. This joint once prospered as a venue for naughty, even dangerous diversion. Then in the 1980s, Las Vegas tried to go mainstream, transforming itself into a desert Disneyland--the Rat Pack gone to the rug rats. Up went casino hotels with exploding volcanoes, battling galleons and amusement parks. Alas, the folks who showed up with their kids had the audacity to spend time with them instead of gambling away the college funds. The casinos compounded their marketing error by offering cheap rooms and cheaper food...
...Vegas really buy some class and still attract the gaming classes? Or is this one crapshoot Sin City can't win? Las Vegas has no choice but to take the wager. It can no longer afford to be a casino-centric town, although the numbers seem to indicate otherwise. Last year some 30.5 million visitors spent $25 billion in Las Vegas and Clark County, including $6.2 billion on gambling, which was up from $5.7 billion two years before. But the gaming take along the Strip has gone from 58% of total revenues 10 years ago to 53% today. That...