Encore Boston Harbor opened on the Everett side of the Mystic River on June 23, 2019, a $2.6 billion bet by Wynn Resorts that Greater Boston wanted a Las Vegas-grade casino resort on a former chemical plant site. Seven years in, the building has done a great deal for Everett’s treasury, less for Wynn’s ambitions, and it is about to become the anchor of a much larger development district that includes two new hotels, a commuter rail stop, and a soccer stadium next door.
The money
The clearest winner is the City of Everett. Under the host community agreement voters approved in 2013, Wynn has paid the city more than $370 million in lieu of taxes over the life of the project, according to The Boston Globe’s seven-year review. The state’s cut passed $1 billion in gaming taxes as of September 2025. The site cleanup alone cost $68 million. Everett’s own Citizens Foundation, funded through the same agreement, handed out $114,425 to twenty local organizations in June and has another round of applications open until September 30.
The resort’s numbers have been flatter. The Globe reported revenue has held at roughly $210 million a quarter for two years, but operating profit slid from about $62 million a quarter two years ago to $50.5 million in the first quarter of 2026, before recovering to $56.1 million in the second quarter. In that quarter, Encore posted the largest profit decline of any Wynn property. The casino floor holds about 2,700 slot machines and 200 table games; the hotel has 671 rooms and has held a Forbes Five-Star rating five years running.
What changed inside
The restaurant lineup tells the story of a resort that opened aiming high and adjusted. The buffet is gone. So are Sinatra, the oyster bar, Seamark Seafood and Cocktails, and On Deck Burger Bar. Still operating are the Rare steakhouse, Fratelli, Frank and Nick’s, the Giardino café, the Mémoire nightclub and Mystique. Sports betting, which Massachusetts legalized in 2023, took in nearly $755 million in gross gaming revenue statewide last year, most of it on phones rather than at the Encore sportsbook.
The people the Globe talked to were blunt. “I wouldn’t say it’s the international destination they were hoping for. It’s a nice regional casino,” said Raymond Pineault, the former president of Mohegan Sun. A former Encore executive, speaking anonymously, said the property “was built with a mind to a very high-end clientele that they have not actually attracted.” The publicist George Regan said he could not name anyone in Boston’s business elite who goes regularly. A Wynn spokesman offered the company’s own framing: “The market looks very different today than it did when we applied for the gaming license in 2013.”
Regulars see it differently. “It’s a place for middle-class people to have an upper-class experience,” Michele Baker of Brookline told the paper. Gene Doucette of Cambridge said he drives over “just for the Michael Jordan Steakhouse.”
What is coming across the street
The next seven years are being shaped by two deals signed in the final weeks of the DeMaria administration and inherited by Mayor Robert Van Campen, who took office in January.
The first, announced January 6, lets Wynn build up to two non-gaming hotels totaling about 800 rooms on land it owns across Broadway from the resort. In exchange the city gets roughly $12 million a year in property, hotel and meals taxes once they open, about $15 million toward transportation improvements including dedicated bus lanes, and up to $25 million toward a future MBTA commuter rail stop on the Newburyport/Rockport line that runs past the site. Construction was to begin as early as this spring, with an opening targeted for 2028. The planning board still had to review the agreement.
The second is the stadium. On the last day of 2025 the Kraft Group reached agreements with both Everett and Boston to build a roughly 24,000-seat, $500 million stadium for the New England Revolution on the site of the shuttered Mystic Generating Station, with a four-acre public park on the riverfront. Everett’s community benefits package has been valued at more than $90 million over 20 years. Permitting is expected to take 12 to 18 months, and demolishing the power plant will take about three years after that, so the first match is years off.
Van Campen, who campaigned partly on scrutiny of his predecessor’s deals, has said he supports “the core of this agreement” on the hotels, citing waterfront revitalization and union construction jobs. He also said, “My goal is to maximize benefits for the people of Everett, and my hope is that my predecessor, through due diligence, did make that happen with these deals.”
The view from Chelsea
Chelsea shares a border and a traffic problem with all of this. The Route 16 corridor that feeds Encore runs along Chelsea’s edge, and a commuter rail stop at the casino would be the next stop inbound from Chelsea station on the Newburyport/Rockport line. Two hotels and a stadium mean more cars on Everett Avenue and Second Street on event nights, and more jobs within walking distance of Chelsea neighborhoods. Both cities have an interest in the transit money being spent before the stadium opens rather than after.
Sources: The Boston Globe, September 5, 2026 (Alexa Gagosz); NBC Boston, January 6, 2026; CBS Boston, 98.5 The Sports Hub and Construction Dive, January 2026, on the stadium agreements; Everett Independent, June 17, 2026; City of Everett. Photo: Encore Boston Harbor from the air, by Arnold Reinhold via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.