Roof views

Driving down Spring Mountain Drive to work I pass the construction site for the new Venetian hotel tower. This construction will add over 3,000 rooms to the Venetian’s 4,000 making this the largest hotel in the world, overtaking the current Largest Hotel In The World – the MGM Grand with 5,500 rooms. Underneath the new tower are parking spaces for 4,500 cars, the first Strip hotel to have parking underneath the facility.

One lane of Spring Mountain is closed, leaving room for construction vehicles and delivery trucks. Also diverted is the sidewalk, which is temporarily covered by a plywood roof to protect people from ‘falling objects’. (I don’t know what good that would do if a crane dropped one of those multi-ton steel girders, but it’s there). A series of concrete dividers keeps cars away from pedestrians. These dividers are used all over the west whenever there is road construction. But these are the first ones I’ve seen with plants glued on top.


Even if the flowers are plastic embedded in concrete, at least there was an attempt at making the place look pretty. To the right is one of the dead trees in a big pot – dead because nobody waters them, and there is no way you can count on Vegas rain to keep them alive (guess they should have used plastic trees too). You can also see the covered walkway, and the top of a concrete truck behind that. The morning I took this shot – from my car when I was stopped for another concrete truck to back up to a pump – there were about twenty concrete trucks lined up ready for a big pour.

Rounding the corner and putting my car on the twelfth floor of the employee (sorry, Team Member) parking garage I come upon this view, which only the employees have:


It’s the top of the Sands Expo Convention Center looking North, with the Venetian towers to the left. You can see the new tower going up in about the middle, with the lower floors already getting their glass put in, even though the top twenty floors haven’t even been framed with steel yet. The Wynn tower is a little to the right.

Turning a little to the right is the rest of the roof:

The row of towers on the left is the Turnberry Place condos, where you can spend $20,000,000 to get a nice Strip view. The new Wynn Team Member parking garage is on the right, with the monorail track above it. The big green area is the Wynn golf course.

Even though the top twenty floors have yet to get steel put in place, much less everything else that goes with a new building, the estimated opening date is still December of this year – shows that when a private company wants to build something the work gets done.

I tried to figure out the roof area covering the convention center. I think it comes out to around 17 acres, covering two floors with over 1,800,000 square feet of convention space, including the five story tower with fancy meeting rooms you can see in front of the new tower (no windows, meeting rooms don’t need windows).