“Industrial afterthought” Everett becomes home to a five-star casino-hotel starting Sunday. Encore Boston Harbor is obviously optimistic, judging by the $650/night base room rate. Of the three gambling-enabled Massachusetts locales, parent company Wynn Resorts got the plum and now it must deliver
on Boston‘s potential as a resort town. So far the Bay State track record is mixed: Plainridge Park has been a home run for Penn National Gaming while MGM Springfield is but an RBI for MGM Resorts International. Academics and legislators are all ratcheting back their early revenue projections for Encore, down from $800 million/year to as little as $540 million. Wynn’s predication of success by luring Chinese whales to Beantown also looks as loony as ever. Said industry expert Clyde Barrow, “it doesn’t make any sense to me why anyone would fly right over Las Vegas to visit Everett, Massachusetts.”
“Everett will no longer be that place where the scrap yards and the used car lots and the power plant are,” said Mayor Carlo DeMaria (he who would not let Wynn skulk away like a thief in the night), outlining a future of retail, dining and hospitality anchored by Encore. Casino President Robert DeSalvio, meanwhile, is sticking by that $800 million number, so we’ll see who’s right.
Wynn has wisely eschewed the uninformative, hackneyed “hard hat tour” (given when the casino could be a nuclear power plant for all that one can 
tell), preferring to showcase the finished product on Friday. Not that the overall product is quite finished: Residences near the resort’s grand entrance have only just been razed, in preparation of something more auspicatory. Bostonians inured to impossible traffic and snarled mass transit remain eagerly skeptical. “It’s a nightmare now. I can’t see how it gets any better,” Everettian Jake Mitchell told a newspaper. He was quick to add, “But I still can’t wait to check it out. I’ll just live there. I won’t come home anymore.”
* Meanwhile, lovely alpine Reno is diversifying away from a casino-based economy. Some of the manifestations of its new identity are public art, rafting 
(the Truckee River runs through downtown), the Wilbur D. May Arboretum and Botanical Garden, the Challenger Center for Space Science Education and more. This is heartening, on a personal note, because I did a big piece on Reno back in 1999, in which the casino powers that be were all confident the city could be reinvented … and 20 years later that prophecy is coming to pass.
* What do you do when you find you have $550 million in tax revenue on your hands? That’s a nice problem that Kansas and Missouri have. While the Sunflower State is a relatively small contributor to that jackpot—$110 million—across the border gaming is the fifth-largest revenue generator. The Show-Me State casino industry employs almost 20,000 people, with Kansas casinos supporting another 3,685. With gaming such an economic bastion even bluenoses will think twice before trying to run it out of town.
* Speaking of employment, or the lack of same, if you though MGM 2020 was bad you should take a gander at Macao, where some 8,000 casino staff are taking early retirement (or “voluntary pension scheme”). You can’t receive a pension until you’re 65, so this is a kind of youth movement by City Hall, winnowing out the older members of the casino staffs. All casino companies are required to pay in, although Sands China, Galaxy Entertainment Group, Melco Resorts & Entertainment and Wynn Macau have all been tardy about joining. It’s a sad day when gerontic Sociedade de Jogos de Macau beats you to the finish line.
* Need something to complement that velvet Elvis on your dining-room wall? How about a fine canvas by Def Leppard drummer Rick Allen? An exhibition of Allen’s art is being held in Wentworth Gallery at Planet Hollywood. “All purchasers of Rick’s art will have the opportunity to spend time one on one with The Thunder God himself.” Who can say no? A portion of the proceeds go to charity and you get an objet d’art you surely will treasure almost as much as that clown painting you picked up at a garage sale.
