Posted on: July 17, 2024, 02:11h.
Last updated on: July 17, 2024, 02:11h.
The Mirage took an hour to honor its past with a closing ceremony on Wednesday, the last day of operations for the casino resort that changed the Las Vegas Strip.
The ceremony took place in front of the famous Stripside volcano, following one last eruption. Mirage executives, accompanied by Nevada gaming officials, had already closed the casino several hours earlier and locked the front doors.
Addressing the gathered audience of hundreds of current and former Mirage employees, Hard Rock International chair Jim Allen recalled catching an usual 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 4 or 5 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 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 to the property in December 2021.
The corporation’s plans are 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 its former self will be left over to trigger nostalgia among its visitors. (Click here to read what will happen to The Mirage’s most famous relics.)
Steve Wynn, the man who dreamed The Mirage up and changed the course of the Las Vegas Strip in the process of making himself a billionaire, did not attend the closing ceremony, and would probably not have been welcomed if he had tried to.
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 denied them and was never convicted of a crime connected to them.
