The Mirage is about to vanish from the Las Vegas Strip. Gambling ended and the doors closed Wednesday at the iconic tropical island-themed hotel-casino that opened in 1989 with a fire-spewing volcano outside, and Siegfried & Roy’s lions and dolphins inside.
Frenzied final days saw standing-room crowds wagering to win US$1.6 million in slot machine progressive jackpot winnings that state regulations say have to be disbursed before the lights go out and a massive transformation of the property begins.
Guest rooms are already empty. The Beatles-themed Cirque du Soleil show “Love” ended its 18-year run earlier this month. When gamblers are gone, only memories will remain of former casino mogul Steve Wynn’s hotel that revolutionized the casino resort industry.
“Las Vegas always reinvents itself,” said Michael Green, a University of Nevada, Las Vegas 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.”
New operators Hard Rock International and Florida-based Seminole Gaming plan to add 600 rooms to an existing 3,044 in a bright new guitar-shaped hotel where the sidewalk-side volcano rumbled and gushed nightly. Renderings depict guitar string-like beams spiking into the night sky from a purplish 201-metre tower.
“The Mirage was a transcendent property, changing the landscape of Las Vegas,” said Joe Lupo, president of The Mirage who will stay on at the new resort. “We are confident that Hard Rock Las Vegas will do the same in 2027.”
There won’t be a demolition spectacle like the now-shuttered Tropicana casino-hotel several blocks down the Strip. That 22-storey property is slated to be dynamited sometime later this year, to be replaced before 2028 by a baseball stadium to serve as the home field of the relocated MLB Oakland A’s.
At ceremonies Wednesday, some of the 127 employees who’ve been at The Mirage since it opened planned to mark its end with Lupo; Jim Allen, chairman of Hard Rock International and CEO of Seminole Gaming; and Alan Feldman, a longtime MGM Resorts casino executive who is now a fellow at the gambling institute at University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Feldman was Wynn’s first publicist at the new resort.
“The doors opened to a crush of humanity and it stayed like that for days,” Feldman recalled in an interview. “It’s hard to capture what The Mirage changed. One of the things was that Las Vegas became more than Elvis, showgirls, round beds and gambling.”
Costing $630 million, it was no simple gambling hall. It was the world’s largest hotel at the time. Guests were met by a faint piña colada scent and two bronze mermaid statues on the way to check in at a desk with a huge shark and reef fish tank behind it.
It had glitzy shops, celebrity chef restaurants and theatre-sized showrooms featuring headliners like Johnny Mathis, Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton.
“Instead of neon, a garden of dozens of rich Canary Island palm trees, and a cool refreshing waterfall,” Wynn recalled in a statement titled it “An Homage to Lady Mirage.”
Amid competition from casinos in Atlantic City and the expansion of tribal gambling in California, Wynn noted that The Mirage was the first new hotel to be built in Las Vegas in years. Its completion ushered in a virtual doubling of the resort 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.
By 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 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.
Feldman recalled that the design of The Mirage made it “an unusual and unexpected place, where people wondered, ‘How do you have all this in the middle of the desert?’”
Bo Bernhard, director of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas International Gaming Institute, studies the emergence of what he terms the “fun economy” around the world. He said The Mirage gave Las Vegas an exportable product, like cars from Detroit, 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 Native American operator in the lucrative and competitive Las Vegas Boulevard corridor. An off-Strip former Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas was separately owned by a group that included billionaire Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group, which acquired that hotel-casino in 2018 from a Toronto investment giant for around $500 million. It was renovated and reopened in 2021 as Virgin Hotels Las Vegas.