Wynn Boston Harbor is going to cost $2 billion for Suffolk Construction to build.
Steve Wynn held a press conference this week to announce the new name for the Wynn Everett Casino, located in a suburb of Boston. While announcing the cost of the casino has now been raised to $2 billion, he also said the new name of the hotel-resort would be “Wynn Boston Harbor“.
The press conference allowed Steve Wynn to address a number of issues, including the new name, a new price tag, the date of the casino’s groundbreaking ceremony, and an upcoming environmental hearing which may determine when the groundbreaking happens. It was a chance for Steve Wynn to reset the conversation in his ongoing dispute with Somerville Mayor Joe Curtatone.
Boston Globe Criticism
The Boston Globe was quite to note the casino would not be in the harbor, as well as Steve Wynn’s reply. To justify the name, the billionaire founder of Wynn Resorts said, “We’re connected to it.”
Mark Arsenault of the Globe, who covered the press conference, said, “Technically true, of course, in the way Boston is connected to Buffalo by roads.”
Steve Wynn in Rare Form
The press conference is said to have been vintage Steve Wynn: immaculately dressed, funny, visionary, and full of boasts. The ostensible reason for Steve Wynn’s first Boston-area press conference in over a year was to unveil the new plans for his casino.
The changes in the development were at the behest of the Massachusetts Gaming Commission, which made certain suggestions when they awarded the Everett casino license in October 2014. Steve Wynn wanted the media to know he complied with those requests, which increased the price of the resort complex by $300 million.
Dispute with Somerville
The real reason for the virtuoso performance may have been to put pressure on Mayor Joe Curtatone of Somerville, who is challenging the environmental and traffic effects of the Wynn casino before Massachusetts regulators. Wynn’s reaction was to cancel this spring’s groundbreaking and call a dramatic halt to construction on the casino.
Everyone realizes Steve Wynn’s halt to construction has a bluff factor to it — that the casino is going to be built. The company founder even said as much at the press conference: “Look, the building’s going to get built, give or take a month or two.”
Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection
Still, the delay is a way to put pressure on Massachusetts officials to give him an answer soon. Joe Curtatone challenged Wynn’s building permit with the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection. Wynn says he still wants to break ground on the casino by June 2016, but an unfavorable ruling by the DEP would cause more delays.
John Fish of Suffolk Construction, which has the contract to build the Wynn Boston Harbor, said the casino would take 28 to 30 months to complete. Given a July start date, the casino likely would open in late 2018. Any delays therefore would push grand opening into 2019 — and cost Massachusetts massive tax revenues.
About Steve Wynn
Steve Wynn is a legend in the American casino industry. Steve Wynn’s family ran bingo parlors in New Jersey when he was a younger man. He preferred to play in the big time, so he went to Las Vegas in the mid-1960s and started working in the casino industry.
In 1971, he turned a Howard Hughes land deal into a controlling interest in the Golden Nugget Casino in Las Vegas. He would gain a reputation as a savvy casino owner over the next decade, then begin building the Golden Nugget Atlantic City in 1980.
When the Golden Nugget Atlantic City opened in 1983, it was simultaneously the smaller AC resort and its most profitable. Wynn would sell the Golden Nugget AC in 1987, perhaps anticipating the tribal gaming laws would mean the loss of Atlantic City’s east coast mononpoly.
1990s Developments in Las Vegas
Or perhaps Steve Wynn simply wanted to focus on Las Vegas. He began the $12 billion casino building boom which Disneyized the Las Vegas area by building the Mirage in 1990 and Treasure Island in 1993. These were corporate-friendly and family-friendly resorts, taking the Sin City away from its image as a mob-owned metroscape.
Wynn hired Siegfried & Roy for their show at the Mirage, while he was instrumental in hiring Guy Lalabert to design many of the early Cirque du Soleil shows. In 1998, Steve Wynn began the next phase in billion-dollar casino-resort design when he opened Bellagio. The Bellagio resort became the inspiration for 21st century integrated resort-casinos like Mandalay Bay and the Venetian Las Vegas.
Wynn’s Macau Ventures
Steve Wynn began to venture outside of Las Vegas again in the 21st century. He opened the Wynn Macau in 2006. As Macau grew to the world’s largest gaming destination — generating 7 times the revenues of Vegas casinos in 2013 — his Chinese casino eventually became the driver of Wynn Resorts’ phenomenal growth of the past decade. Even with the downturn in Macau’s fortune, Steve Wynn is set to open the Wynn Palace on the Cotai Pensinula in Macau.
Meanwhile, he continued to build his Las Vegas empire. In 2005, Steve Wynn opened his grandest casino in the city: the Wynn Las Vegas. He recently won the rights to open the first-ever casino in the Boston area: the Wynn Boston Harbor in Everett, Massachusetts. In 2016, Wynn Resorts is a global gaming company whose upside has yet to be reached.
