The big, bold numbers pervade every element of this project: a 210,000-square-foot casino, 15 dining outlets, 671 guest rooms and suites (including a 5,800-square-foot Presidential Villa), 50,000 square feet of event space, a 450-seat buffet restaurant, and a staff that will eventually number 5,500 (including hundreds of graduates from The Greater Boston Gaming Career Center at Cambridge College, which Encore helped develop in order to cultivate an East Coast casino workforce). Give us a sense of the scope of this place? The first thing to know about Encore Boston Harbor is that it’s not coy about its price tag everything from the press release to its official Instagram handle drops the figure “$2.6 billion” like it ain’t no thing. Inside, a huge carousel-made entirely of silk flowers and crystals-holds court in a light-drenched central atrium with intricate mosaic floors. Park the car in a multi-lane valet operation (trying not to let the neighboring Mercedes Maybach shake your confidence) and four uniformed bellhops descend, NASCAR-pit-crew style, to sweep your luggage away. Jutting up from a stretch of waterfront that’s sparsely scattered with low-lying buildings and factories, Encore is a 33-acre property where flowers miraculously bloom all year in Massachusetts and no surface is untouched by something gold. If the curved bronze glass looks familiar, that’s because it’s identical to the ritzy Wynn Las Vegas (this is its East Coast sister). One more casino resort may be issued, though there has been no announcement yet.What was your first impression? As you drive along I-93, curving your way out of the city, the only way you’d miss Encore Boston Harbor is if you were futzing with CarPlay and not paying attention to the massive building looming in the distance-there’s even an official highway sign trumpeting the brand-new casino-resort. A slot parlor opened at Plainridge Park Casino in 2015, and MGM and Encore are two casino resorts.

In 2011, the Expanded Gaming Act passed in Massachusetts, allowing as many three casino resorts and one slot parlor to be opened in the state.

It cost $960 million to build, according to The Boston Globe, and has 250 rooms, nearly a dozen food and beverage outlets and a 125,000-square-foot casino. In August 2018, MGM opened a 2 million-square-foot casino resort in Springfield, Massachusetts, about 90 miles from Boston. The resort planted 1,000 trees and plenty of floral as well as sculptures. The Harborwalk, opening the same day, is a park that opens the shoreline to the public for the first time in more than a century, according to Encore.

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