Iconic Las Vegas hotel that changed the face of Sin City shuts for good as last guests check out

The Mirage is about to vanish 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 at the iconic tropical island-themed hotel and casino will shut for good. 

The final hotel guests had left on Sunday. The Beatles-themed Cirque du Soleil show ‘Love’ ended its 18-year run earlier this month. 

It had opened in 1989 with a fire-spewing volcano outside, and Siegfried & Roy’s lions and dolphins inside.

Frenzied final days have seen standing-room crowds wagering to win $1.6 million in slot machine winnings that state regulations said have to 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 the volcano will be gone, and instead a 700-foot-tall tower in the shape of a guitar – similar to the one at the Florida hotel – will appear. 

The Mirage shut for good on Wednesday – after opening in November 1989

Hard Rock Hotel & Casino’s plans to build an iconic guitar-shaped hotel in place of The Mirage

Steve Wynn, a casino mogul, opened the Mirage in 1989  and it would begin in a new era of upscale resorts that were as much about dining and shows as gambling. 

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

‘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 where the sidewalk-side volcano rumbled and gushed nightly. 

Renderings depict guitar string-like beams spiking into the night sky from a purplish 660-foot 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-story 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. 

Also there was 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.

Feldman said: ‘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 pina 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 theater-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 released Monday through his Las Vegas attorney, Donald Campbell. Wynn titled it ‘An Homage to Lady Mirage.’

Amid competition from casinos in Atlantic City, New Jersey, 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.

Wynn, now 82 and living in Florida, paid a $10 million fine to Nevada gambling regulators last year 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 against him.

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. 

Steve Wynn, the former casino mogul who opened The Mirage

Aaron Bartosic of Millville, Pennsylvania, gambles at the Mirage on July 14 – days before its closure

Las Vegas Magicians Siegfried (left) and Roy show off three new, six-day-old additions to their royal white tiger family on October 28, 2002 at The Mirage Hotel and Casino

Magicians Siegfried And Roy pose for a portrait with a white Tiger at their enclosure at the Mirage Hotel in March 1990

The Mirage visitors watch the resort’s volcano attraction

Dallas Cowboys’ fans Tom Connolly, left, and Eddie Hidalgo, of Los Angeles, celebrate in the Mirage’s sports book after winning one of their bets on the Super Bowl on January 28, 1996

The silhouettes of Beatles members are projected on the screen during the preview of ‘Love,’ a new Beatles-themed Cirque du Soleil show, in Las Vegas on June 27, 2006

People watch the Volcano show at the Mirage on May 13, 2022

The Mirage Hotel and Casino is seen in Las Vegas, on May 3, 2018

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. 

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 from a Toronto investment giant for around $500 million. It was renovated and reopened in 2021 as Virgin Hotels Las Vegas.