Dennis McBride of the Nevada State Museum came to our rescue. "The most significant building on the site of the Palazzo was the Tam O'Shanter Motel -- 45 years on that spot before it closed and was razed. There were a few other adjacent small businesses," he adds.
David G. Schwartz, director of the University of Nevada-Las Vegas’ Center for Gaming Research, confirmed this and pointed our way to some latter-day photos of the Tam O’Shanter (below).
Ever ingenious, Las Vegas Sands CEO Sheldon Adelson crammed Palazzo onto approximately five acres at the intersection of the Strip and Spring Mountain, immediately south of Wynn Las Vegas. (By contrast, the building itself is covered in 7.3 acres of glass.) Onto those five acres he stacked 159.5 acres of hotel space and 3,066 suites, across 47 stories, making Palazzo Nevada’s second-tallest building, behind the Stratosphere Tower.
This makes Palazzo solamente the world’s 12th largest hotel, just ahead of the Mirage (3,044). Genting Highlands’ First World Hotel has a jaw-dropping 6,118 rooms, making it the world’s largest … unless, like VegasTodayAndTomorrow.com, you count the Venetian and Palazzo together as one monster hotel with a grand (and we do mean grand) total of 7,128 rooms and suites.
However, when it comes to cramming a megaresort onto a small plot of land, Adelson’s got nothing on Paris-Las Vegas, which Hilton Gaming built in the late '90s on 3.78 acres. That’s less acreage than the Planet Hollywood/Miracle Mile parking garage alone.
In the cases of both Palazzo and Paris, such compactness was made possible by sharing back-of-house infrastructure with an adjoining property. In the case of Paris, it enjoys a symbiotic relationship with Bally’s Las Vegas (the two flow imperceptibly together via an elegant corridor).
A free-standing megaresort, though, requires a bit more sprawl. The first of the breed, Mirage (which opened in 1989), encompasses almost 14 acres -- if one includes Treasure Island. MGM Grand’s 5,029 hotel rooms and other amenities occupy in excess of 60 acres. But it’s unlikely anyone will soon surpass Adelson’s concentration of 3,066 hotel rooms into five acres.
Even at the height of his Tropicana-related folly, when he proposed to replace the venerable resort with a 10,000-room hotel complex jammed into 34 acres (i.e., twice as many rooms as MGM Grand in half the space), Columbia Sussex CEO William Yung was only proposing a ratio of 294 hotel rooms to the acre. Adelson’s 613-to-1 ratio is, however, a benchmark that will probably stand for some time to come.
Photographs appear courtesy of the Neon Museum and Palazzo. Click on the thumbnails for the big versions.
