Unless you were planning to play 18 holes at the links at Wynn Golf Club, scheduled for demolition, the building of Wynn Paradise Park should have little or no effect on your stay at Wynn Las Vegas or Encore.
While Steve Wynn initially estimated the completion date as some time in 2020, the Wynn Resorts board of directors has yet to rubber-stamp the proposal and Wynn was even willing to scrap it entirely when there was a chance he could get an NFL stadium on his back nine.
Now that it has opened Wynn Palace in Macau, the company is primarily focused on Wynn Boston Harbor in Everett, Massachusetts, slated for a June 2019 debut. Also, the last time Steve Wynn tried to build two megaresorts simultaneously (Bellagio and Beau Rivage), his stock was pummeled, which may account for the apparent indecision about Paradise Park.
Budgeted at $1.5 billion and planned to occupy 130 acres of the Wynn empire, Paradise Park will feature a 38-acre lagoon that will reportedly host parasailing, surfing, waterskiing, and paddle about, standing up or sitting down and feature a sandy beach. A 1,000-room hotel tower overlooking the lake will have a small casino. While plans aren't finalized, nine holes of the golf course could remain.
Paradise Park will also have a seven-acre "performance lake" for one of Wynn's trademark water shows. Non-hotel guests will have to pay to access the lake, but Wynn is promising them ice cream and nightly fireworks in return. Though he hasn't talked about it much lately, every time he does discuss the project, the ante seems to go up.
For example, importing an idea from Wynn Palace, he has discussed SkyCabs (gondolas) that would transport visitors from the street into the resort. He was also mulling the idea of having people zip line or take a gondola to a restaurant on an island in the middle of the lagoon. Wynn, a braver man than some of us, even ventured a couple of zip rides on downtown's Slotzilla, then vowed to build the same thing at Wynn Paradise, only bigger and better.
And last August he revived an idea that had long been weighed, and ultimately scrapped, by the Stratosphere: a giant animatronic King Kong. "And on the second [island], we will have an eight-story-tall King Kong who will make a nightly appearance before the water shows," Wynn told retailers. "He will be articulated to turn 360 degrees and have a 50-foot arm spread, and in his left hand he will hold a girl. He will have animated eyes and make a big sound. Millions of people come to Vegas every year and we know they will come to see this. The question is, how much will they pay?"
(Wynn might be trying to make amends to himself for his perceived mistake of making the Mirage volcano a free attraction.)
One problem seems to be that the bigger and more elaborate Wynn makes his mechanical ape, the more he invites technical trouble. An LVA reader was quick to spot the similarity to the giant 12-ton Abominable Snowman at Disney's Animal Kingdom.
"Here's what happens when you build a huge heavy animatronic in a fake mountain. It breaks down and never gets fixed, because you have to destroy the mountain to fix the animatronic." That's what happened at Disney and the solution was to bathe it in strobe lights, causing the animatronic ape to be dubbed Disco Yeti.
Wynn's original concept for Paradise Park was elegant in its simplicity: the lagoon, a casino with 50 table games, a tea lounge, retail, a 689,000-square-foot spa, a 29-story hotel, and (perhaps most importantly) a convention center to capture business that Wynn has seen flowing to MGM Resorts International and Las Vegas Sands. However, with all the attractions that have been or will be added, the grand opening could extend well into the next decade.
