World’s Largest Hotel Opens in Las Vegas

This city’s newest mega-resort opened to the public before dawn Saturday, with 65,000 visitors expected to jam the world’s largest hotel and the city’s first full-fledged theme park on opening day.

“Everything’s going very smoothly,” Tom Bruny, spokesman for the MGM Grand Hotel and Theme Park, said Saturday afternoon.

The hotel was scheduled to open to the public at 10 a.m., but opened five hours ahead of schedule “to alleviate crowd control problems,” Bruny said.

More than 3,000 invited guests received a sneak preview of the new $1-billion resort in a gala party Friday night.

Gov. Bob Miller and Las Vegas Mayor Jan Laverty Jones said they would not attend the gala preview because of an informational picket line planned by the powerful Culinary Union. Culinary officials were upset because the hotel refused to open under union representation.

“The informational picketing was a non-event as far as we were concerned,” Bruny said Saturday.

As for the absence of the governor and the mayor?

“They missed a good fireworks show and a great party,” Bruny said.

The invited guests spent the afternoon touring a 33-acre theme park, a first for Las Vegas as the city moves toward more family-oriented entertainment.

Dozens of characters from the Wizard of Oz fable entertained the crowd, with a band drowning out the chants of pickets.