Thursday, July 18, 2024
reading time: 3 minutes
The Mirage, a popular Las Vegas Strip resort, is closing its doors after 35 years of transformation, marking the end of an era of luxury and innovation.
Nearly 35 years after its initial transformation on the Las Vegas Strip, the Mirage Hotel closed its doors Wednesday afternoon. The property is set to undergo a three-year transformation, emerging as a Hard Rock with a new guitar-shaped hotel tower replacing the iconic Mirage Volcano.
Contrary to its name, The Mirage left a lasting mark on the Las Vegas Strip by making luxury accessible to all and elevating Las Vegas’ status among business and leisure travelers. Designed by casino mogul Steve Wynn, The Mirage featured lush gardens, playful dolphins and extravagant shows like Siegfried and Roy, demonstrating that a resort on the Las Vegas Strip could offer more than just gambling.
“This hotel has raised the bar in Las Vegas with its multifaceted hotel assets designed to appeal to all types of visitors – domestic and international, trade show and convention/meeting attendees, and those looking to participate in special events and new entertainment and dining opportunities,” said Rossi Ralenkotter, former chairman of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. “This hotel has become a model throughout the destination.”
“This has created the opportunity to attract visitors from all market segments,” said Ralenkotter, who helped his father open the Mirage and has worked in his dice pit for 20 years. “The high-quality, state-of-the-art conference facilities have added to the success and growth of the meeting markets throughout Las Vegas.”
“People thought Wynn was a little crazy, especially when it became known that the resort needed to make a million dollars a day to make money,” said Tim Dahlberg, who grew up in a small Las Vegas town before covering the city as a reporter when the Mirage opened.
Dahlberg said he could vouch for Wayne’s sanity after going to the Mirage two days after it opened and finding it as suffocating with people as if it were still opening night.
“It was unlike any property that Las Vegas residents had ever seen, and everyone was amazed by everything,” Dahlberg said.
The Mirage, which opened in 1989 at a staggering cost of $630 million (about $1.6 billion), was an instant success. Its influence is clearly evident in the larger, more luxurious resorts that followed. Las Vegas’s modern hotels, meeting spaces, and restaurants are significantly more advanced than what existed before the Mirage, which sparked a 20-year boom in casino development.
“The city is always in motion, and just when it seems ready to stop, something else comes along and pushes it forward,” said Dahlberg, who still covers Las Vegas as publisher of a monthly seniors magazine. “That was the case when Caesars opened in 1967, the International opened in 1969, and the Mirage opened two decades later.”
The Mirage has been gradually closing its doors over the past week, with slot machines shut down and the casino floor increasingly dim. Behind the hotel’s check-in desk, an empty space has replaced the giant aquarium that once housed guests before the age of cellphones. On Wednesday, tourists toured the hotel while hotel managers paid tribute to the staff and the Mirage’s legacy.
“When Steve and Elaine Wynn opened The Mirage in December 1989, it not only changed Las Vegas, it changed the way people viewed gaming. It became a true destination,” Jim Allen, chairman of Hard Rock International, told CNBC.
