Bellagio: The Night the Strip Decided to Be Beautiful

Steve Wynn had already changed Las Vegas once. His Mirage, opened in 1989 with its erupting volcano and white tigers, had kicked off the mega-resort era and proved that lavish spectacle could pull crowds and pay for itself. But Wynn had a restless eye and a chip on his shoulder about how the world saw his city. Las Vegas was rich and famous and, in the minds of a lot of cultured people, hopelessly tacky.

Wynn wanted to build something that would make those people change their minds. He took as his inspiration the village of Bellagio on the shore of Lake Como in Italy, one of the most romantic places in Europe, and he set out to evoke its elegance without making a theme park of it. The goal was sophistication. He wanted a guest to walk in and feel they had arrived somewhere refined, somewhere that respected them.

He tore down the old Dunes hotel to clear the site, a property with deep roots in the earlier mob-tinged era of the Strip, and on that ground he poured more than a billion dollars into a resort built around an artificial lake. The lake alone was a statement. In a desert, in a city obsessed with squeezing every square foot for gambling revenue, Wynn devoted acres of prime Strip frontage to a body of water whose only job was to be lovely.

The centerpiece was the Fountains of Bellagio, a vast system of programmable jets and lights set into that lake, choreographed to soar and sway in time with music ranging from opera to pop standards. When the fountains performed, water leapt hundreds of feet into the air in precise, almost balletic patterns, and the effect on a crowd was something the Strip had never quite produced before.

It stopped people. The fountains turned the sidewalk in front of the Bellagio into a gathering place, a spot where tourists and locals and high rollers all stood shoulder to shoulder at the railing, looked up, and felt a small wave of wonder. And it was free. Anyone could watch, no ticket, no minimum bet, no cover charge. In a town engineered to extract money at every step, the most famous attraction was a gift.

Of course, the gift was strategic. The fountains pulled enormous crowds to the front of the property, and a fraction of those crowds drifted inside to spend. The free spectacle was the lure for the paid experience behind it. But that did not make the wonder less real. Wynn had built an emotional engine, a thing that made you feel before it ever asked you for anything, and the rest of the Strip took careful notes.

Wynn pushed his point further than fountains. He opened a fine art gallery inside the Bellagio and stocked it, at first, with masterpieces from his own collection, real works by the kind of painters whose names hang in the great museums of the world, Picasso and Monet and Van Gogh among the artists associated with that early collection. He charged admission to see them and treated them with the seriousness of a museum.

This was provocative in the best way. Conventional wisdom said gamblers did not care about Impressionists and that fine art had no place next to a slot floor. Wynn bet the opposite, that putting genuine masterpieces in a casino would tell the world this place was different, that it took beauty seriously, that a Las Vegas resort could be a place of culture and not just consumption.

He carried the same obsession into the details. The lobby ceiling was hung with an enormous installation of hand-blown glass flowers by the artist Dale Chihuly, a riot of color overhead that signaled the moment you walked in that this was not an ordinary casino. There was a conservatory and botanical garden that changed with the seasons. Every surface seemed designed to say the same thing. We thought about beauty here. You are worth the effort.

The Bellagio opened in October 1998 and it landed exactly as Wynn intended. It was hailed as the most luxurious resort the Strip had ever seen, and it forced everyone else to respond. The cheap-room, volume-driven model still had its place, but Bellagio proved there was a fortune in the opposite direction too, in luxury, in elegance, in charging a premium for a refined experience.

The ripple effects reshaped the south end of the Strip. The competition that followed, the era of high-end resorts and serious restaurants and designer shopping and curated nightlife, owes a direct debt to the standard Bellagio set in 1998. Las Vegas had spent the early nineties chasing families with theme parks. Bellagio helped swing the pendulum back toward adults with money and taste who wanted to be flattered.

Steve Wynn would lose control of the Bellagio not long after, when his company was acquired and folded into a larger empire, and his personal story later took its own difficult turns. But the building outlasted all of that. The fountains still dance. The conservatory still changes with the seasons. The gallery still hangs real art.

Here is what I find remarkable. Wynn's whole bet was that beauty would pay, that if you spent a billion dollars making something genuinely lovely in a city famous for the opposite, people would reward you for it. He was right. The Bellagio proved that wonder is a business, that you can charge for elegance, and that even in the most calculating town on earth, a crowd will still go quiet to watch water dance against the night.