Bar has been raised

By Brian Greenspun (contact)

Friday, April 29, 2005 | 5:23 a.m.

Vegas has another Wynner!

It is hard to write about the Wynn Las Vegas hotel without reaching deep into a bag full of superlatives, an exercise already repeated in newspapers and on television sets all over the world. So, to save the repetition and to keep it simple, Steve Wynn has met every expectation, each of which was exceedingly and unreasonably high.

Besides my wife, Myra, who informed me long ago that we would be taking part in the pre-opening party for charity, I had the good fortune of attending the Wynn opening with my mother, Sun publisher Barbara Greenspun. It is one thing for Myra and I to compare Wynn Las Vegas to, say, the first MGM Grand Hotel, which opened the decade of the '70s and was our first hotel opening together, and every hotel since then, including the Mirage, Mandalay Bay and Bellagio. It is quite another to see Wynn Las Vegas through the eyes of a woman who was there at the beginning.

The beginning, of course, was Bugsy Siegel's Flamingo Hotel, the joint that started this whole thing. When it opened, people had barely heard of Las Vegas. And they certainly couldn't fathom a hotel in the middle of the desert, practically on a dirt road between Salt Lake City and Los Angeles, with a couple of hundred rooms that would be filled by who even knew, and a casino the likes of which no one had ever seen. My mother and father were there almost 60 years ago. And I don't think my mother has missed an opening of a hotel since.

So if it is experience I was seeking to get a proper perspective on Wynn Las Vegas, I didn't have to go far.

In fact, for the right kind of perspective you can do two things. Go to the golf course and see the Wilbur Clark Bridge and enjoy the beauty of the golf clubhouse and the nostalgia of the Tournament of Champions, pictures of which grace the club's wooded walls. In those two nods to the great history that was once Wilbur Clark's Desert Inn Hotel, Steve Wynn has been able to leapfrog 55 years of Las Vegas history to the present and a presence that no one could have ever dreamed of when the dreaming started over half a century ago.

And dreams are what Wynn Las Vegas is all about. When Steve and his wife, Elaine, bought the Desert Inn in 2000, they decided to change the name. It would be called Le Reve. It was a name taken from the 1932 masterpiece by artist Pablo Picasso and it meant "The Dream."

Somewhere along the line Le Reve became Wynn Las Vegas but the dreams did not stop and the Desert Inn would not go away. They were each connected to one another. That is what my mother saw the other night. It was a building erected upon the dreams of others but given an unparalleled reality that only a Steve Wynn could accomplish.

Steve likes to tell people that his challenge, despite what many others might have thought about his competitive juices flowing toward the other majestic hotels in Las Vegas, was to defy what the whole world believed was the repository of timeless beauty. He is one of those people you love to meet in your life who never asks why but, rather, why not?

Why do the places the world calls beautiful have to have been built in the 18th or 19th century? Why do timelessness and stability have to be equated to the talented people of centuries past? Why can't we in the 21st century use the technology that only we have and the understanding of history that only we have and build that which is beautiful, timeless and everlasting? And why not build all that right here, right now in this place of everyone's dreams, Las Vegas?

This past week Steve answered those questions. And while only time will really tell, it is an odds-on favorite that Wynn Las Vegas will succeed in capturing the top spot in the imaginations of a world full of people looking for something wonderful to dream about.

But enough about dreams. Right now there are at least a handful of other people, some we may know and others we have not yet heard about, who are putting their dreams to paper in their quest to build the next Bellagio, the next Wynn, the next ... fabulous something that will continue to write the history and the future of this most incredible city.

The reality is that what Steve Wynn has built has raised the bar high enough that others will build up to it and some will try to surpass it as we continue to grow in this valley toward a future that is inescapable. Other places will have gambling -- most already do. And some will build pretty places -- a few have done that, too. But as long as the dreamers keep coming here and as long as Las Vegas welcomes them and allows them the freedom to explore, there is no end to the power that this engine of growth can put forth.

I realize that besides a bar of beauty, innovation, determination and delight -- all of which have been raised at Wynn Las Vegas -- there is an economic challenge that makes it difficult for the timid to play. The price tag of Wynn is $2.7 billion. That's 2,700 rooms for $2.7 billion. That is not only unbelievable, but it also is practically unimaginable. This begs the next question: What's next?

I don't know the answer, but I do know that there will be a next. The entire Strip to the north of Wynn, on both sides of the street, have now been made safe for redevelopment. Whether it is the current hotels stepping up and renewing themselves or whether it will be more Desert Inns cum Wynn Las Vegas that will lead the way, the future is clear on this one point.

Las Vegas is going to continue to grow and it will do so in a way that yesterday's dreamers, while they wouldn't recognize what Las Vegas has become, so, too, would they also not be surprised!

So, welcome Wynn Las Vegas. You have not disappointed. Rather, you have shown the rest of us the way. The whole town toasts to your success.