The Borgata

Rank #4
Cost: $1.1 billion

The $1.1 billion Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa, the largest construction project in Atlantic City's history, is the first new casino to open on the New Jersey coast in more than 10 years.

The resort owned by Boyd Gaming Corp. and MGM Mirage is also the largest hospitality development built in North America in recent years.

The massive, 4.2-million-sq.-ft. development includes more than 2,000 guest rooms, 125,000 sq. ft. of gaming space, a 50,000-sq.-ft. European-style spa, 70,000 sq. ft. of conference space, 11 restaurants and dozens of lounges and shopping and entertainment facilities.

And it was completed in less than three years. Keeping to such a schedule required extraordinary coordination, which Tishman Construction Corp. of New Jersey and W.G. Yates & Sons Construction Co., of Philadelphia, Miss., the project's construction managers, often referred to as military in its attention to detail.

The resort opened in July 2003.

The development was divvied into separated smaller projects, with the 2,200 workers working on either the low-rise section of the project, which included the casino, restaurants, retail and parking; the guest room tower and infrastructure; or the landscaping.

Each element was its own challenge. The low-rise structure had a composite-steel frame with bolted moment connections, a cellular deck system for the floor and long-span columns. Consequently, the space could have bigger-than-average clear spans for the ballrooms and gaming space.

In the high-rise, a cast-in-place flat plate system was used as a frame to create thinner slabs and higher ceilings for bigger guest suites. Overall, the team used 100,000 cu. yds. of concrete for the frame and 30,000 tons of steel rebar to build the tower.

The new hotel was built on a landfill, which required the project team to drive more than 3,800 steel pipes into sand and top it with more than 1,000 cu. yds. of concrete to create the 17-acre building footprint. A shallow water table required extensive dewatering of the site, a new water treatment unit and imported soil to provide proper remediation.

Because of the site's former use, the team also installed an integrated piping system around the pile caps to collect methane and ensure that the site was environmentally healthy.

Other infrastructure improvements included the $330 million Atlantic City-Brigantine Connector, which improved access to the resort. The resort even merited a new thermal plant. The new $40 million Marina Thermal Facility will provide heat, hot water and cooling to the Borgata and the entire Renaissance Pointe area of Atlantic City.

Finally, the project team beautified the former city dump by planting 35,000 shrubs, 3,100 trees, 10 acres of wildflowers and seven acres of sod. To maintain the landscaping, the project team installed 69 mi. of irrigation pipes.

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