Lumière Place Casino

Buoyant St. Louis Project
Cruises Toward Completion

The architects and contractors behind a new casino and hotel project along the Mississippi River in downtown St. Louis have water to deal with-but the river is not the concern.

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The water that comes into play in the Lumière Place Casino Resort development fills a manmade basin in which the casino portion of the project floats.

As in many states, Missouri casinos are legal only if they float and float on river water no more than 1,000 ft from the river itself. That makes for some unusual architectural and construction challenges, at least for those trying to build a casino that doesn’t resemble a riverboat.

Gamblers walking into the casino portion of the Lumière Place project won’t even be aware that they’re boarding a boat, says Brett Ewing, president of architecture at Marnell Architecture, a Las Vegas firm that specializes in casinos and is the designer on the project.

The designers are well aware that under normal circumstances an empty barge will float higher on the water than a barge loaded with hundreds of fortune seekers.

They had to create a vessel that floats at the same level no matter how many or how few people are onboard, even if a crowd rushes to one side of the boat to watch a lucky slot player collect a jackpot.

Simply put, “when everybody leaves, a restraining device grabs the floor so that it does not pop up,” Ewing says.

“It’s put under ‘positive buoyancy,’” adds Jon Jacobsmeyer, project manager for McCarthy Building Cos., the St. Louis-based contractor that is building the $495 million casino and hotel project for Las Vegas-based Pinnacle Entertainment Inc. He says that about 100 steel rods run through the basin and they vertically anchor the 400- by 200-ft concrete barge.

Entertainment Development

When the Lumière project is complete near the end of the year, it will include the casino, a five-star-quality hotel tower, multiple restaurants and parking. There also will be a pedestrian tunnel under Interstate 70 offering easy access to visitors at the America’s Center convention complex and Edward Jones Dome.

An existing hotel is being renovated as part of the project, a former Embassy Suites. The new hotel in the tower McCarthy is building has yet to be named. 

The site is just north of the historic Laclede’s Landing riverfront area, known for cobblestone streets and rehabbed structures. That is playing a role in the building’s appearance, Ewing says.

“We had to pay some homage to the Laclede historic district, so the building’s façade from the south is more traditional, with a lot of brick and stone,” he says, adding that its styling on the south takes cues from Frank Lloyd Wright as well. “But as you move north and over to the entry and hotel, it becomes contemporary, with simple lines and all glass, two colors of green glass.”

The 20-story hotel, which will offer 200 rooms, will light up the downtown skyline with an LED-backlit arc that will swoop up the side of the tower, curve 40 or 50 ft above the top floor and run back down the other side, Ewing says.

“At night it can change color and become animated,” he adds. “It changes width as it goes up the side, to almost a knife point at the top.”

Drill-pier foundations support the project, which includes a valet parking area and the casino basin below grade. On the street level will be porte cochere canopies at the entrances to the casino and hotel, and the casino floats at this level. Five levels of parking rise from the street, along with some hotel office and support space.

Public components of the luxury hotel begin on the sixth floor, with ballroom, meeting and spa space on the sixth and seventh floors.

“The lobby is on the eighth level, about 100 ft above grade, looking across a pool deck and a view of downtown St. Louis,” Ewing says, adding that the guest rooms are on the floors above that. The project also includes a 24-hour restaurant, a buffet, steakhouse and coffee shop.

Adjacent to the project, the former Embassy Suites hotel is being renovated into a four-star-quality property to be named The Suites at Lumière Place. The $16 million project will be overseen by Legacy Building Group of St. Louis, and the renovated hotel will be connected to the casino via sky-bridge, Maesano says.

Looking at Construction

The biggest construction issues are the sheer size and complexity of Lumière Place, coupled with the demanding schedule, McCarthy’s Jacobsmeyer says.

Construction began in January 2006 and is expected to be completed in time for an opening near the end of this year. McCarthy was running three shifts during part of the construction, working up to 20 hours a day, and has settled into two shifts in the home stretch.

“The layout of the structure includes three different grid patterns coming in at angles,” Jacobsmeyer says. “We had a lot of square footage being put in at once.” In all, the project will enclose approximately 1.6 million sq ft.

The complicated project has required coordination of four tower cranes at one point. McCarthy obtained a crane management system from Malaysia to ensure safe operation in such a compact space. Jacobsmeyer says the system prevents cranes from interfering with one another and prohibits trolleying of loads over areas where people below would be endangered.

Though Lumière Place is required by Missouri casino law to be built in relatively close proximity to the Mississippi River, there’s enough distance and slope to prevent any river problems, Jacobsmeyer says.

“We’re pretty isolated from any effects of the river” both in terms of the present construction work and any danger from future flooding along the Mississippi, Jacobsmeyer adds.

“We installed earth-retention systems on three sides of the project to allow the streets to be used,” he says.

Making construction of the pedestrian tunnel a bit simpler was the fact that the interstate highway is elevated as it passes by Lumière Place and the convention center. That allowed for open-cut construction, rather than tunneling under the roadway, Jacobsmeyer says.

The building, he says, “is a significant glass job,” given the fact that curtain wall covers the tower’s façade, and “each glazing unit was about 700 lbs,” Jacobsmeyer says. As for the structure, he says some steel can be found in such places as the casino roof, but the majority is concrete.

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