Mirage resort closes its doors on the Las Vegas Strip

LAS VEGAS — A final blast from The Mirage’s signature volcano marked the passage Wednesday of an aging Las Vegas resort that wowed crowds when it opened in 1989 and went on to revolutionize the casino resort industry and reshape Las Vegas as a tourist destination.

“What would The Mirage be without one last volcano eruption?” asked Joe Lupo, property president of The Mirage, as he ended a closing ceremony that drew hundreds of onlookers, including 137 employees who worked at the 3,044-room resort from the beginning.

Jim Allen, head of the property’s new owner, Florida-based Hard Rock International and Seminole Gaming, said work would “literally start tomorrow” to raze the volcano, which rumbled and gushed nightly for nearly 35 years.

Plans call for a 600-room hotel in the shape of a guitar that renderings depict with guitar string-like beams spiking into the night sky from a purplish 660-foot (201-meter) tower. Allen promised more details in months to come.

Lupo, who remains the property president following the change of hands, said the new Hard Rock Las Vegas will open in 2027.

Elaine Wynn, billionaire philanthropist and ex-wife of casino mogul Steve Wynn, who built the property, recalled that two performing tigers belonging to resort headliners Siegfried & Roy were the first “guests” through the door in November 1989. She said the first wave of people stopped, stared and applauded beneath the entry atrium. It featured lush tropical foliage beneath a domed glass ceiling and a faint piña colada scent in the air.

Its last week drew a frenzy of standing-room crowds wagering to win a total of $1.6 million in slot machine progressive jackpot winnings that state regulations said had to be disbursed to clear the books before the doors closed. Slot players lucky enough to get a seat vied for daily prize pots totaling up to $250,000 per day. Nevada Gaming Control Board spokesman Michael Lawton said Wednesday that he could not by law provide information about how the effort went.

Costing $630 million, The Mirage was no simple gambling hall. It was the world’s largest hotel when it opened. Visitors were met by two bronze mermaid statues on the way to check in at a desk with a huge shark and fish tank behind it.

It had glitzy shops, celebrity chef restaurants and theater-size showrooms featuring headliners like Johnny Mathis, Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton. The illusionist duo Siegfried & Roy and their tigers performed for 14 years, ending in 2003. Later, it became home to The Beatles-themed Cirque du Soleil show “Love,” which ended its 18-year run this month.

“Instead of neon, a garden of dozens of rich Canary Island palm trees and a cool refreshing waterfall,” Steve Wynn recalled in a statement of recollections he released Monday through his Las Vegas attorney, Donald Campbell. Wynn titled it “An Homage to Lady Mirage.” He did not attend Wednesday’s ceremonies.

In his statement, Wynn noted that The Mirage was the first new hotel in Las Vegas in several years and opened amid competition from casinos in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and the expansion of tribal gambling in California. He pointed to a decade-long resort building boom that followed, helping make Las Vegas one of the fastest-growing cities in America.

“To call The Mirage a catalyst would be an understatement,” Wynn wrote.

By 2000, more than 30,000 new hotel rooms were added as new Las Vegas Strip resorts went up: Excalibur, Luxor, Treasure Island, MGM Grand, New York-New York, Monte Carlo, Bellagio, Mandalay Bay, Venetian and Paris Las Vegas. Many were funded by Wall Street bonds. Wynn bought and demolished the 50-year-old Desert Inn to build and open his eponymous Wynn Resort in 2005.

Wynn, now 82 and living in Florida, paid a $10 million fine to Nevada gambling regulators last year and cut ties with the industry he helped shape to end a yearslong legal fight stemming from media reports in 2018 that he sexually harassed or assaulted several women at his hotels. He has always denied the allegations.

Bo Bernhard, director of the International Gaming Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, studies the emergence of what he terms the “fun economy” around the world. The Mirage, he said, set a standard for resort development in places like Singapore and Sydney.

“The Mirage changed the image Las Vegas projected to the rest of the world,” Bernhard said. It was “much more than just gambling” and “transformed everything,” he said.

The Seminole Tribe acquired the Hard Rock brand in 2007 from an MGM Resorts International deal worth nearly $1.1 billion. It became the first Native American operator in the lucrative and competitive Las Vegas Boulevard corridor. The tribe also operates seven casinos in Florida and owns the Hard Rock Hotel & Casinos business with locations in 76 countries. It purchased naming rights in 2016 to Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens, Florida.

An off-Strip former Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas was separately owned. A group that included billionaire Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group, acquired that hotel-casino in 2018 for about $500 million. It was renovated and reopened in 2021 as Virgin Hotels Las Vegas.

“Las Vegas always reinvents itself,” said Michael Green, a UNLV history professor whose father dealt blackjack for decades at casinos, including the long-ago-imploded Stardust and Showboat. “The Mirage is no longer state-of-the-art.”