The opening of the MGM Grand in Spring eld this week highlights the failure of the Gaming Commission to do in Everett what it has done for Springfield.
In Everett, we are watching with awe, and then with wonder, and many of us finally, with concern, the totally out of place, fairly hideous, golden colored skyscraper standing 27 stories with its circus like grand entranceway buildings that are more the stuff of comic book drawings than genuine architecture. The entire assemblage fails at every level to integrate the project into the city’s landscape with a sense of design.
In Everett, there is no integration with the city.
It is Las Vegas East, without a moment of consideration for anything local or dignified or sensible from an architectural viewpoint.
In Springfield, the city went to great lengths to blend the casino into the downtown area. With great care and attention, this effect has been accomplished.
As the Boston Globe reported, the casino doesn’t stand out and everything associated with its creation is about the city, its history and its people.
The MGM Grand blends in.
Every effort was made in Springfield to create a non-Las Vegas style and effect.
The Everett skyscraper is exclusively about Las Vegas. There isn’t an ounce of Everett in it. Boston doesn’t look like this either.
It is too late now to do anything other than to grin and bear the 27 story gaming Goliath that has been built-in a city where the second tallest building is 8 stories high in Everett Square.
The overpowering Las Vegas visage of this shining golden monster rising to the sky is something to behold.
But it isn’t Boston and it certainly isn’t Everett.
All things considered, the Everett casino, with its Steven Wynn imprimatur, is as ugly on the outside as it could possibly be.
Las Vegas has been transferred to Everett, to Boston, to New England.
We welcome the money that will be generated for the city by this project.
But when you come right down to it, the hotel building is as ugly and out of touch with Everett, Boston and Massachusetts, as Soviet style monolithic housing from the early 1960’s would have been.
Those of us who enjoy Boston’s architectural serendipity could not be more disappointed in the ugly, golden, soaring tower with the Encore name scrawled garishly on it as it nears completion.
It is Las Vegas large and Las Vegas ugly, as out of place here as the MGM Grand in Springfield would be in Las Vegas.