Casino Hotels

A pavilion is a building put up for an exhibition and meant to stand on its own. It carries one country or one theme, it is designed to be looked at from every side, and it is usually built with the understanding that the exhibition will close. Some pavilions are taken down afterwards. A few are kept.

What it names here

Here the word names the whole of the hotel and the complex around it. The house is a kept exhibition pavilion on an island in the river, joined to a second pavilion from the same exhibition. Guests arrive into a building designed to be walked through rather than slept in.

Where the word comes from

English took pavilion from French, where it named a tent, and dictionaries connect that sense to a Latin word for a butterfly, by way of the shape of a spread awning. The exhibition sense, a single building for a single exhibitor, is the one used on this island.

How the house uses it

The upper levels are reached by a wide interior stair rather than a lobby corridor, because the plan was drawn for visitors climbing through displays. Restaurants and the hotel desk sit inside that shell. The gaming floor is not described here.

A galleria is a covered street: a passage under glass or a solid roof, lined on both sides with shops and places to eat, wide enough that people walk it the way they walk an ordinary street. The word belongs to buildings that keep a public route running indoors through private property.

What it names here

At this resort the Galleria is the retail and dining passage that runs through the complex. Shops and counters open off it, and it connects the hotel with the rest of the building, so a guest crosses it without meaning to. It is named in the resort's own material, not borrowed for this page.

Where the word comes from

The word is Italian, the same root as gallery, and it attached itself to nineteenth-century arcades in Italian cities that were roofed with iron and glass. English keeps it for interior shopping streets and lets gallery do the work in museums.

How the house uses it

The passage carries the everyday traffic of the house: people going to eat, people waiting for a show, people cutting from the parking levels to the lifts. Storefronts face it on both sides. The gaming floor is not described here.

A boardwalk is a path made of boards laid across a soft or wet edge: a riverbank, a marsh, a beach. The point of it is that you can walk where the ground will not hold a road, and that the walk is public even when the land behind it is not.

What it names here

Here the word names the walk along the north side of the complex, on the river. It runs beside the resort's marina, and it is the part of the property that faces water rather than parking. From it the far bank is in view, and boats are tied up along the berths.

Where the word comes from

The word is plain English compounding, board and walk, and it spread with seaside towns that laid planks over sand. It is used in North America for any planked public path at a waterline, including working river frontage like this one.

How the house uses it

The walk gives the hotel a second front. Doors from the building open onto it, the marina berths run alongside, and people use it to reach the water without going through the interior. The gaming floor is not described here.

An entertainment centre, in the language of large resorts, is a single hall built to be reset: seats for a concert one night, a flat floor for a trade show the next. It is not a theatre in the repertory sense. It is a room whose only fixed features are the stage, the rigging and the doors.

What it names here

At this resort the Entertainment Centre is exactly that hall, and the resort uses the name itself. It is a seated theatre inside the complex, booked for touring music, comedy and other events. It sits on the lands of the Chippewas of Rama First Nation, on which the resort stands.

Where the word comes from

The phrase is ordinary North American English of the later twentieth century, assembled rather than inherited: entertainment for the programme, centre for the building that holds it. It is written with the Canadian spelling in the resort's own material.

How the house uses it

Because the hall is flexible, the seating plan changes with the booking, and the corridors around it are sized for a full house arriving at once. Its doors are separate from the hotel entrance. The gaming floor is not described here.