Word: venetian
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...Angeles of the 1940s made an appearance at the Loeb mainstage last Friday night, and I can get it out of my skin. I want to be a scowling man with chest hair in a battered with Venetian blinds. I am nostalgic for a time and place I have never been--is there a better sign that a show has hit home...
Where Schaeffer sees the 50-plus crowd, Adelson sees thousands of free-spending conventioneers in his Venetian. The initial $1.2 billion phase, set to open next April, will feature 3,000 luxury suites, a convention center second only to Chicago's in size, and a pricey shopping mall with a 1,200-ft. canal running through it--on the site of Frank Sinatra's old haunt, the Sands...
Adelson made a fortune in the trade-show business, and he financed some of the Venetian's construction by selling Comdex, the world's biggest trade show, for $900 million. Although Las Vegas does plenty of convention business, Adelson wants to compete for the monster shows that now go to Chicago's McCormick Place or Orlando's Orange County Center, in Florida...
...Venetian is a study in duplication. Everything from the Doges Palace to the Campanile was built virtually to scale of the original. Craftsmen labored at a workshop in suburban Las Vegas, turning out hand-chiseled columns and marble floors to the exact specifications of an architectural historian imported from Venice. ("This isn't some box with slots in it," says Wynn respectfully of his rivals' projects...
Adelson is trying to bring a new ingredient to the basic Las Vegas hotel rooms: comfort. The bathrooms in the all-suite Venetian are the size of standard hotel rooms. He spent $9 million just to create step-down living rooms in each suite, to impart the feeling of luxury. "Las Vegas' yesterday thinking was casino-centric. The idea was to deprive guests of creature comforts to keep them in casinos," he says--no minibars, no snacks in the room, no safe-deposit boxes, no fax machines and certainly no computer hookups. Says he: "If you were hungry, they imagined...