Iconic Las Vegas hotel that changed the face of Sin City closes for good as last guests leave

The Mirage is set to disappear from the Las Vegas Strip, after ushering in a new era for Sin City 34 years ago.

After a farewell party Wednesday afternoon, the doors to the iconic tropical island-themed hotel-casino will close for good.

The last guests at the hotel left on Sunday. The Beatles-themed Cirque du Soleil show “Love” ended after 18 years earlier this month.

It opened in 1989 with a fire-breathing volcano outside and Siegfried and Roy’s lions and dolphins inside.

The frantic past few days have seen standing-room-only crowds betting on $1.6 million in slot machine winnings that, under state regulations, must be paid out before the lights go out.

The 3,044-room resort will reopen as Hard Rock Las Vegas in 2027. The tropical theme and volcano will disappear, and in its place will be a 700-foot-tall guitar-shaped tower — similar to the one at the Florida hotel.

Casino mogul Steve Wynn opened the Mirage in 1989 and ushered in a new era of high-end resorts that focused as much on dining and entertainment as they did on gambling.

It was also the first to have a sidewalk attraction, in the form of a volcano. The Mirage revolutionized the casino industry. But it too has grown old and needs a reboot.

“Las Vegas is always reinventing itself,” said Michael Green, a history professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, whose father played blackjack for decades at casinos including the now-defunct Stardust and Showboat.

“The Mirage is no longer at the cutting edge of technology.”

New operators Hard Rock International and Florida-based Seminole Gaming plan to add 600 rooms where the sidewalk volcano once rumbled and erupted every night.

The renderings depict guitar-string-like beams rising into the night sky from a 660-foot purple tower.

“The Mirage was a transcendent property, changing the landscape of Las Vegas,” said Joe Lupo, president of the Mirage, who 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 that of the now-shuttered Tropicana hotel-casino, located a few blocks from the Strip.

The 22-story property is scheduled to be demolished later this year, to be replaced by a baseball stadium sometime before 2028 that will serve as the home field for the relocated Oakland A’s baseball team.

At ceremonies Wednesday, some of the 127 employees who have worked at the Mirage since it opened planned to mark its end.

Also in attendance was Alan Feldman, a longtime executive at MGM Resorts. He is now a fellow at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and was Wynn’s first publicist for the new resort.

Feldman said: “It’s hard to describe what The Mirage has changed. One thing is that Las Vegas has become much more than Elvis, showgirls, round beds and gambling.”

At a cost of $630 million, this was no mere casino. It was the largest hotel in the world at the time. Guests were greeted by the faint smell of pina colada and two bronze mermaid statues as they entered a check-in desk with a massive aquarium of sharks and reef fish behind it.

There were glitzy boutiques, restaurants with celebrity chefs and theater-sized showrooms with headliners like Johnny Mathis, Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton.

“Instead of neon lights, a garden of dozens of Canary Island palms and a refreshing waterfall,” Wynn said in a statement released Monday through his Las Vegas attorney, Donald Campbell. Wynn called the project “A Tribute to Lady Mirage.”

Facing competition from casinos in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and the expansion of tribal gambling in California, Wynn noted that The Mirage is the first new hotel to be built in Las Vegas in years.

Its completion marked a 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 say The Mirage is a catalyst would be an understatement,” Wynn writes.

In 2000, new hotel complexes opened, including Excalibur, Luxor, Treasure Island, MGM Grand, New York-New York, Monte Carlo, Bellagio, Mandalay Bay, Venetian and Paris Las Vegas.

Many of them 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 a Florida resident, paid a $10 million fine to Nevada gambling regulators last year to end a years-long legal battle stemming from 2018 news reports that he sexually harassed or assaulted several women at his hotels. He has consistently denied the allegations against him.

Feldman recalled that the Mirage’s design 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 International Gaming Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, studies the emergence of what he calls the “pleasure 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 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 enterprise with locations in 76 countries. It purchased the naming rights in 2016 to Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens, Florida.

A former Hard Rock Hotel located off the Strip in Las Vegas was owned separately.

A group including billionaire Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group, acquired the casino hotel in 2018 from a Toronto investment giant for about $500 million. It was renovated and reopened in 2021 as Virgin Hotels Las Vegas.