LAS VEGAS — The Mirage is in danger of disappearing from the Las Vegas Strip.
Gambling ends and the doors close Wednesday at the iconic tropical island-themed hotel-casino that opened in 1989 with a fire-breathing volcano outside, and Siegfried & Roy’s lions and dolphins inside.
In the final days of the season, spectators flocked to bet on the $1.6 million in progressive slot machine jackpots. State rules require that the jackpot be paid out before the lights go out and the massive transformation of the building begins.
Guest rooms are already empty. The Beatles theme Cirque du Soleil show “Love” ended its 18-year run earlier this month. When gamblers are gone, all that will remain are memories of the former casino magnate Steve Wynns hotel that revolutionized the casino resort industry.
“Las Vegas is always reinventing itself,” said Michael Green, a history professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, whose father spent decades playing blackjack at casinos including the long-imploded Stardust and Showboat. “The Mirage is no longer state of the art.”
New operators Hard Rock International and Florida-based Seminole Gaming plan to add 600 rooms to the existing 3,044 in a brand new guitar shaped hotel where the sidewalk-side volcano rumbled and gushed every night. Renderings show guitar-string-like rays shooting into the night sky from a 660-foot (201-meter) purple tower.
“The Mirage was a transcendent object that changed the landscape of Las Vegas,” said Joe Lupo, president of The Mirage, which will remain at the new resort. “We are confident that Hard Rock Las Vegas will do the same in 2027.”
There will be no demolition spectacle like the one now closed Tropicana casino hotel a few blocks down the Strip. That 22-story building is expected to be demolished later this year, to be replaced by a baseball stadium by 2028 that will serve as home to the relocated MLB Oakland A’s.
During Wednesday’s ceremonies, some of the 127 employees who have been with The Mirage since its opening planned to celebrate with Lupo; Jim Allen, chairman of Hard Rock International and CEO of Seminole Gaming; and Alan Feldman, a veteran casino executive at MGM Resorts who is now a fellow at the gaming institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Feldman was Wynn’s first publicist at the new resort.
“The doors opened to a mass of people and stayed that way for days,” Feldman said in an interview. “It’s hard to grasp what changed The Mirage. One of the things was that Las Vegas became more than Elvis, showgirls, round beds and gambling.”
It cost $630 million and was no mere gambling den. It was the largest hotel in the world at the time. Guests were greeted by a faint smell of piña colada and two bronze mermaid statues on their way to the check-in counter with a giant shark and reef fish tank behind it.
There were gleaming shops, celebrity chef restaurants and theater-sized showrooms featuring stars like Johnny Mathis, Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton.
“Instead of neon, a garden with dozens of lush Canary Island palm trees and a cool, refreshing waterfall,” Wynn recalled in a statement released Monday through his Las Vegas attorney, Donald Campbell. Wynn called it “A tribute to Lady Mirage.”
Amid competition from casinos in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and the expansion of tribal gambling operations in California, Wynn noted that The Mirage was the first new hotel built in Las Vegas in years. Its completion heralded a virtual doubling of the resort’s capacity over the next decade — more than 30,000 hotel rooms — making Las Vegas one of the fastest-growing cities in America.
“To call The Mirage a catalyst would be an understatement,” Wynn wrote.
In 2000, new resorts included Excalibur, Luxor, Treasure Island, MGM Grand, New York-New York, Monte Carlo, Bellagio, Mandalay Bay, Venetian and Paris Las Vegas. Many were financed 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 severed ties with the industry he helped shape. ending a years-long legal battle following media reports in 2018 that he had sexually harassed or assaulted multiple women in his hotels. He has always denied the allegations against him.
Feldman recalled that The Mirage’s design made it “an unusual and unexpected place, where people wondered, ‘How can all this happen in the middle of the desert?’”
Bo Bernhard, director of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas International Gaming Institute, studies the rise of what he calls the “fun economy” around the world. He said The Mirage gave Las Vegas an exportable product, like Detroit cars, and set a standard for resort development in places like Singapore and Sydney.
The Seminole Tribe acquired the Hard Rock brand in 2007 and is the first Indian 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 with locations in 76 countries. It bought naming rights in 2016 to Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens, Florida.
A former Hard Rock Hotel off the Strip in Las Vegas was separately owned. A group including billionaire Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group, acquired the hotel-casino from a Toronto investment giant in 2018 for about $500 millionIt was renovated and reopened in 2021 as Virgin Hotels Las Vegas.
