Mirage Las Vegas Holds Goodbye Ceremony, Locks Doors

Posted on: July 17, 2024, 04:00h. 

Last updated on: July 17, 2024, 09:21h.

Corey Levitan Read More
Expertise: Commercial Gaming, Entertainment, Expert Insight, Las Vegas.

The Mirage took some time to honor its past — at least most of its past — with a closing ceremony on Wednesday, the last day of operations for the casino resort that changed the Las Vegas Strip.

Hard Rock International chair Jim Allen says goodbye. (YouTube/@News3LasVegas)

The ceremony gathered hundreds of current and former Mirage employees in front of the resort’s porte-cochère for about 90 minutes. It was followed by one last eruption from the Stripside volcano and a private tour of the casino before Mirage executives, accompanied by Nevada gaming officials, closed the casino’s front doors at 11 a.m.

During the speeches, Hard Rock International chair Jim Allen recalled catching an unusual sight out of the corner of his eye the night before — a group of Mirage architects drinking at one of the bars.

Allen recalled asking John Wald and Brian Fink, principals of Kali Juba Wald Architects: “This is normally on opening night, what are you guys and gals doing?”

Allen said they replied: “We had to be here. We had to be here the last night the legendary Mirage closes.”

As he walked away, Allen recalled, he felt very sad.

“And I said to myself, ‘God give me strength. Hopefully, we are making the right decision here,’” he said, “because when you start committing four or five billion and beyond, you don’t want to break apart something that has so much history.”

Between a Hard Rock and a Beloved Place

Over the next three years, The Mirage, which had been visited by millions since opening 34 years ago and was neither unprofitable nor showing serious signs of its age, will be gutted down to its concrete before being remade into the second Hard Rock Las Vegas casino resort.

Hard Rock International, owned by the Seminole Tribe of Florida, paid MGM Resorts $1.075 billion in cash for the operating assets of the property in December 2021.

The corporation plans to add 600 rooms to the structure’s existing 3,044 by building a giant, guitar-shaped hotel where the volcano once erupted nightly.

Virtually no trace of the former Mirage will be left to trigger nostalgia among its visitors. (Click here to read what will happen to The Mirage’s most famous relics.)

The Ignored Part of Its Past

Though Elaine Wynn was among the speakers, no mention was made during the ceremony of her former husband, Steve Wynn, who was an expected no-show. The man who dreamed The Mirage up in his head and changed the course of the Las Vegas Strip in the process of willing it into reality, clearly would not have been welcomed if he tried to attend.

Wynn, now 82 and living in Florida, paid a $10 million fine to the Nevada Gaming Control Board last year and cut ties with the industry he helped shape to end a years-long legal battle over allegations that he sexually harassed and assaulted several women at his hotels.

The allegations were first made by the Wall Street Journal in 2018, though Wynn has always denied them and was never convicted of a crime connected to them.