Our 2008 skyline
Eight storeys down, 19 to go for $400-million casino expansion
Trevor Wilhelm, Windsor Star
Published: Sunday, March 25, 2007
They’re changing Windsor’s skyline one floor at a time.
Now that a few “milestone” jobs are done in the Casino Windsor expansion, including the frame of a sprawling entertainment complex, workers are adding a floor a week to the hotel tower that will become Windsor’s tallest building.
Each floor is about 1,300 square metres, almost the size of an NBA basketball court. They’re eight storeys up with 19 to go.
“That’s what we’re trying to do, put one of those down in concrete every week,” said project director Doug Singbush of Eastern Construction, the company hired to expand Casino Windsor. “Floor and walls, floor and walls.
That’s the cycle to the top. It is an intense pace. Everything goes in a cycle and you can’t miss any phase of the cycle.”
The $400-million casino expansion project began in 2005 with excavation for three levels of underground parking, and construction of exterior walls and supports for the high-rise hotel.
The completion date is still set for early 2008. Despite rumours to the contrary, Ontario Lottery and Gaming spokeswoman Teresa Roncon said the project is on schedule and on budget.
“Nothing has changed,” she said.
That means there will still be a new 400-room hotel tower, 5,000-seat entertainment centre, 100,000 square feet of convention space, new restaurants and retail space and a six-bay bus loading area with waiting lounges.
There will also be a 30,000-square- foot sky bridge linking the expansion to the existing casino, with hotel registration and a 120-seat restaurant.
That existing casino is also undergoing renovation. A two-level entrance space in the rotunda area has replaced the Atrium waterfall and includes a welcoming bar below and entertainment lounge above.
The project will generate 7,000 construction jobs, with about 400 workers on site every day, and 400 new jobs in the facility when it’s complete.
About 42 per cent of the project’s $400-million budget has been spent, with $105 million so far going to local vendors, according to a fact sheet released by the casino. The City of Windsor has received $815,000 in permit fees.
As of Friday, Singbush said workers had poured 32,000 cubic metres of concrete. By the time they’re finished, they will have erected 4,500 metric tonnes of steel.
With all that work, the casino won’t have any more slot machines than it did before. The gaming areas were renovated and reorganized, Roncon said, but not expanded.
She said the casino is still targeting gamblers, but wants them to be impressed by more than slot machines and poker tables.
“It’s about the entire experience,” said Roncon.
The casino has already given the public a taste of what the experience will include, along with news it will be renamed Caesars Windsor when the “Las Vegas-style” complex is fully opened.
In December, it unveiled the 9,454-square-foot two-level rotunda topped by a six-storey dome. It has marble columns, balconies with archways, winged statues holding trumpets and gold wreaths. It also includes a night club with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the river.
Work has also started on some less glamorous projects, such as the new Energy Centre. Part of University Street is closed for cranes to lift steel onto the site.
The Energy Centre, to be contained in the existing parking garage, will provide thermal energy for the expansion. The centre will also have electrical generation capacity to provide green energy, 30 per cent of which will be fed back into the electrical grid, according to the fact sheet.
OLG and the City of Windsor have also commissioned a traffic study focusing on flow around the casino, tunnel and downtown areas. An environmental assessment is also underway to permanently close the part of McDougall Street that bisects casino property. Roncon said results are expected in a few weeks.
In the meantime, she said the steel superstructure forming the six-storey Podium, which will house the theatre, ballrooms and convention space, is complete.
Singbush said the siding — metal liner and white panels — was going up Friday. Major work on the guts of the Podium, including the electrical and duct systems, was well underway, he said.
So was work on the span linking the old and new facilities.
“These are big milestones,” said Singbush. “This is a critical finishing phase for us.”
Roncon said another big milestone will come around the beginning of August, when they set the top of the hotel tower in place with massive cranes.
“That’s always one of the big photo ops,” she said.
At 104 metres tall, about the height of three basketball courts stood on end, the hotel tower will be Windsor’s highest building.
The only thing that might slow work down, said Singbush, is the wind. The far-reaching cranes have high-tech instruments that automatically shut the machines down when they sense wind.
“Weather is a problem,” he said.
They make up for it by labouring all hours of the day. Work on that tower usually starts at 5 a.m. and doesn’t stop until late into the night.
“Long days of split shifts allow us to jam everybody on the floor and still get it done,” said Singbush.
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