Big Gems Spur 2nd Honeymoon in Vegas : Casinos: Three resorts lead a building boom aimed at the uninitiated.

In this city that delights in confusing the sublime with the ridiculous, the newest entry in entertainment extravagance, Luxor, opened Friday, heralded by thousands of gamblers who queued up at 4 a.m. between the back end of a 10-story sphinx and the front door of a full-size, glass-enclosed pyramid.

That’s how they’re doing things out here these days, because the gambling moguls who shape Las Vegas have concluded that this town can no longer stand on casinos alone.

Later this month, a mock frigate at a new pirate-infested hotel-casino, Treasure Island, will fire a cannon toward the landmark Dunes hotel. Explosive charges will level it to make way for yet another mega-resort.

And on Dec. 18, a new MGM Grand will open as the world’s largest hotel-casino, with 5,005 rooms, a 35-acre theme park and characters from “The Wizard of Oz” welcoming adults and children to this desert metropolis that no longer relishes its nickname of Sin City.

All told, more than 10,500 hotel rooms will open on the famous Strip over the next 10 weeks--an unprecedented expansion in a city already blessed with the densest concentration of tourist facilities in the world. The building spurt carries a $2-billion price tag, reflecting the collection of new architecture and attractions unusual even here in a city jaded by the ostentatious.

“Hotels are now becoming an entertainment experience in and of themselves,” said Steve Wynn, chairman of Mirage Resorts Inc. Simply building “more and more stacks of rooms on top of bigger and bigger boxes of casinos” will no longer satisfy the public, he said.

“The challenge to Las Vegas is to . . . hold the same kind of fascination in the ‘90s that it did in the ‘60s and ‘70s,” Wynn added.

The three huge hotel-casinos are not the entire growth story. Earlier this month, ITT Sheraton announced it would build its own $1-billion, 5,000-room hotel and casino on the Strip. Its theme has not been disclosed.

Even the 10 casinos in the historic downtown gambling district, which seem dated in comparison to those on the Strip, are making their own altar call to the 21st Century in hopes they can remain temples to gambling.

In January, they will break ground for the Fremont Street Experience, in which Los Angeles architect Jon Jerde, a designer of downtown renewal projects, will cover the street with a 100-foot-high canopy of lights suspended on a track and moving to music.

The $63-million light show is designed not only to reinvigorate downtown by offering tourists a must-see attraction but also to convert the street into one huge foyer so that gamblers will roam between casinos.

Midway between downtown and the Strip, Vegas World casino-hotel owner Bob Stupak is half-finished erecting what he says will be the ninth-tallest observation tower in the world: a 1,012-foot tripod he calls the Stratosphere.

Several weeks ago, construction was delayed by a spectacular fire. But work has resumed, and when completed next year, Stupak says, the revolving lounge and restaurant--and four wedding chapels--at the top will look like a hovering space saucer, partially hidden in fog spewed from machines.

Adding to the $50-million illusion: thrill rides. Two-rider capsules will encircle the observation deck, 1,000 feet above the ground.

By comparison, the Eiffel Tower is 984 feet and the Space Needle in Seattle is 605 feet--and neither is topped by a carnival ride.

Leading the latest Las Vegas make-over was Friday’s debut of Luxor. The spectacle featured the image of King Tut projected on a curtain of water spray. There’s also a beacon of light--the equivalent of 40 spotlights, supposedly visible to airline passengers over Los Angeles--shooting from the top of the 30-story pyramid.

“This place is truly something else,” remarked Dennis Rohland, vacationing from Eau Claire, Wis. He and 8,000 others got up for the resort’s 4 a.m. public opening. While gamblers rushed to the virgin casino tables, Rohland gazed upward to the top of the pyramid, its 2,526 rooms seemingly plastered on the sloping walls like honeycomb.

“How did they do that?” he wondered aloud.

Luxor, built for about $400 million by the same people who own Circus Circus and Excalibur, is being positioned as another must-see attraction. Local marketing studies show that 85% of the country’s population has avoided Las Vegas, and that is the market now being aggressively targeted.

Casino owners are sweetening the Vegas pot with pyramids and pirates and high-tech thrill rides, on top of the white tigers and exploding volcanoes, the magic shows and the circus acts that already are offered.

Casino executives say their motive reflects the need for Las Vegas to compete with the growing spread of legalized gambling across the country, on riverboats, Indian reservations and even at neighborhood convenience stores with Lotto machines.

To help shore up the city’s claim to be the throne of gambling, the entire kingdom is slowly but inexorably being re-landscaped.

“Casino revenue is clearly still No. 1,” said MGM Grand spokesman Tom Bruny. “Always has been, still is and always will be. But now we view gaming as another form of entertainment.” So if you don’t want to play craps, try the log flume.

Bill Thompson, a public administration professor at the University of Nevada Las Vegas and an expert on the gambling industry, agreed that Las Vegas is undergoing Disney-fication as a marketing ploy to attract Middle America.

“Now we’ve got to deal with a long-run social issue,” Thompson said. “If children are exposed to gambling at an early age, and they see their parents doing it, they’ll see gambling as a legitimate activity.”

Meanwhile, the older generation of casinos in Las Vegas are trying to adjust to the new competition in town.

“We’re going to have to bring our own properties up (in quality) and work on our own ambience,” said Arthur Waltzman, president of the 40-year-old Sands. The hotel will undergo renovation and room expansion at a cost of $100 million or more, Waltzman said.

“I’ve got to bring the Sands into this new, modern era,” he said.

The downtown casinos are betting their future on the neon canopy and light show, says Jean Hood, chairwoman of the Four Queens hotel and casino and president of the Downtown Progress Assn.

With the Strip development, downtown business owners realized they could no longer rely exclusively on gambling purists in order to compete, she said. So the downtown group agreed to fund the Fremont Street Experience.

“Among ourselves, we are fiercely competitive, but we realized we’d have to work together if we were going to put ourselves on the entertainment map,” she said.

For this week, though, the brightest new star belongs to Luxor, despite some opening glitches. At one point during the opening festival, each of the three hightech rides failed, causing Nevada Gov. Robert Miller to remark sarcastically that “the first hour of this has been fun.”