American Experience: Las Vegas - An Unconventional History (63 of 75)
COOPER: Historically, within the internal organization of the resort, the casino was king, and the showrooms, the rooms, the bars-- they existed merely as appendages of the casino.
It didn't matter if they made a profit or not.
They were the lure to get people into the casino.
Well, Steve Wynn changed all that, much to the detriment of the tourists' pocketbook.
What that meant was that while it would cost the tourists a lot more because the day of the $20-a-night room was gone and the free meals were being phased out.
He upgraded the level of luxury to a point where a middle-class person could come to Las Vegas and feel like he really was a millionaire.
REPORTER: "Pounding the pavement" took on a new meaning today, especially at the Mirage Hotel, where thousands of feet jockeyed for space to see the new playland.
NARRATOR: 100,000 people had been expected to show up for the resort's grand opening in November 1989.
200,000 actually came.
Inside of a few weeks, the Mirage surpassed Hoover Dam as the leading tourist attraction in Nevada.
(people cheering and shouting) With three separate wings, 29 stories and a total of three million square feet, the Mirage was the largest resort casino on the face of the earth...
a complex so sprawling that it resembled not a resort but a city.
So many service workers were needed to run the place-- some 4,000 in all-- that Wynn had had to cut a historic deal with the Culinary Union just to open his doors.
But it wasn't the size of the Mirage that really captured attention.
It was the resort's exuberant celebration of sheer stupefying spectacle: a 20,000-gallon marine tank stocked with pygmy sharks, stingrays and trigger fish;
an ecologically authentic tropical rain forest; and a 54-foot man-made volcano that periodically spewed steam and flames into the night sky. |
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