Resort changed the face and fortunes of Las Vegas

Robert Macy

Tuesday, Nov. 23, 1999 | 9:31 a.m.

On a crisp November morning 10 years ago, Steve Wynn walked the grounds of his new Mirage hotel-casino and promised it would be "a wonderment the world will flock to see."

Even Wynn, who counts Walt Disney among his heroes, couldn't have imagined how his bold $630 million venture would change the face, fortunes and future of Las Vegas.

The hotel, which marked its 10th anniversary Monday, is seen as the genesis for the "new" Las Vegas - a multibillion-dollar explosion of megaresorts and a doubling of visitor volume, hotel rooms and gambling revenues.

"It caused Las Vegas to go in the right direction, to provide a deeper, richer experience for the visitor," Wynn, chairman of Mirage Resorts Inc., said Monday.

Jason Ader, a casino analyst for Bear, Stearns & Co. Inc. in New York, said the Mirage was "one of the key engines responsible for the wave of growth Las Vegas has experienced the past 10 years."

"The Mirage has created the reason for people all over the world to come to Las Vegas," Ader said.

When the 3,044-room, 29-story hotel opened Nov. 22, 1989, skeptics predicted it would not be able to generate the $1 million a day needed to meet its debt service and operating costs.

Wynn made light of the skepticism on opening day, noting the $1 million daily nut and boasting "Anything above that we get to keep."

The critics were proven wrong. The first year the resort generated revenues of $720.5 million, averaging nearly $2 million daily.

Wynn predicted at the time the success of the Mirage would prove Las Vegas and its casinos were a safe bet for Wall Street and the investment community. The city's early casinos were built with mob money, later through the scandal-plagued Teamsters Pension Fund.

"In the end, that was the most important thing," Wynn said Monday. "The Mirage spent $630 million and no one had spent over $150 million up to that point. The Mirage would show that Las Vegas was a safe place to invest that kind of money. No one had invested on that scale before."

Ader said Wynn surprised Wall Street by exceeding the $1 million a day.

"They figured he would never get the $1 million a day in revenue needed to make the economic model work," Ader said. "Sure enough, he did it. Nobody ever doubted Steve Wynn again."

As for the impact on Las Vegas, the visitor volume has jumped from 18.1 million in 1989 to a projected 32.3 million this year. Those visitors are expected to pump $24.6 billion into the Las Vegas economy in 1999, more than double the $11.9 billion in 1989.

Mirage Resorts Inc. has developed two other megaresorts here, Treasure Island and Bellagio, and is a partner in another, Monte Carlo. It also owns the Golden Nugget hotel-casinos in Las Vegas and Laughlin, Nev. and the Beau Rivage in Biloxi, Miss.

Other megaresorts that followed Mirage here include the Excalibur, MGM Grand, Luxor, New York-New York, Rio, Stratosphere, Mandalay Bay, Venetian and Paris.

The building boom has propelled the Las Vegas Metropolitan Area to the fastest growing in America, with the county's population jumping from 708,750 in 1989 to 1,337,400 today.

Ader believes the Mirage set a pattern for new casino development not only in Las Vegas, but worldwide.

"I think every casino that has been built since then has taken a little bit of the Mirage, whether it be the boats or native American Indian casinos," Ader said. "You see a little of the Mirage in every casino designed since then."

Manny Cortez, now head of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, was a member of the powerful Clark County Commission when Wynn built the Mirage.

"The Mirage really set the standard for resort properties in the '90s," Cortez said Monday. "If you were going to be a player in Las Vegas, you were going to have to compete with the Mirage. And you can see what happened."

The hotel was the first new one built here in 16 years.

"In the late 1980s we had a period of time where tourism was kind of flattening out," Cortez recalled. "After the Mirage was built, tourism got rolling again. It just kind of jump-started everything."