Elaine Wynn was emotional. 

Before Wednesday morning’s closing of The Mirage, Wynn, who is credited with helping develop the Strip resort in 1989 alongside her then-husband, Steve Wynn, admitted she hadn’t visited the property in years. 

Elaine Wynn said her two daughters often referred to The Mirage as “their third sibling” because of the family’s attention to the creation of the hotel-casino, which attracted worldwide attention as the Strip’s first all-new resort in 15 years.

“They had to expand the family to let us embrace something else that we love,” Wynn said. The idea behind the design, she added, was to simply ask, “What can we do to make the people go ‘wow?’ What can we do to make them think, well, who would ever think of building that place?’”

Gaming historians credited The Mirage, built at a then-unheard cost of $630 million, with kicking off three decades of development into what is now the modern Las Vegas Strip.

“The Mirage made an entire gaming industry better,” said Joe Lupo, who has been the resort’s general manager since Hard Rock Entertainment acquired operations of the property from MGM Resorts International in 2022 for $1.1 billion.

The property will undergo a three-year renovation and rebrand into the Hard Rock Las Vegas. Not many details about the development have been disclosed, other than plans for a guitar-shaped hotel to rise nearly 700 feet above the Strip.

Wynn was one of the featured speakers during the closing ceremony in the hotel’s porte cochère, which included 137 day-one Mirage employees who watched as padlocks were fastened to the main entrances. 

She remarked that this was the first time she had been to a closing event “for one of our own.” Mirage Resorts, which included three casinos in Las Vegas and a resort in Mississippi, was sold to MGM 24 years ago.

“It’s a very poignant moment for me, and I didn't realize the impact of it until I walked into the building,” Wynn said Wednesday. “But this is what we do in Las Vegas. We reinvest, we refresh, and we keep Las Vegas as one of the most exciting cities in the entire world.”

She recalled one of her favorite memories from opening day when thousands of visitors lined The Mirage’s driveway down to the Strip and made their way through the front doors. 

“They came in and all of a sudden they looked at the atrium and they stopped and they applauded. They were clapping. I said ‘We are getting a standing ovation,’” Wynn recalled. “It was such a magnificent validation of the work and all of the energy and all of the time and the love that was invested in this property.”

Not talking about the Hard Rock — yet

Hard Rock Chairman Jim Allen told the media before the closing ceremonies that he wasn’t going to get into the specifics about plans for the Hard Rock Las Vegas, other than to say the popular glass-domed atrium area and other features will not survive the redevelopment. 

Two non-gaming attractions, Siegfried and Roy’s Secret Garden, which housed the late entertainers' lions, tigers and other animals, and the property’s Dolphin Habitat disappeared soon after Hard Rock took over in 2022.

The Mirage’s Y-shaped hotel towers will remain, but the rooms will be given an extensive makeover.

“[Today] is really about the legacy of The Mirage and all the employees that worked here since 1989,” Allen said. “We plan on having a major announcement sometime in the last quarter of this year or first quarter of next year [concerning Hard Rock Las Vegas].” 

Following the speeches, guests were treated to one last performance by the faux 54-foot-tall volcano along the Strip, the future site of the guitar tower.

“Bulldozers and construction people will be here tomorrow,” Allen said “We've been slowly mobilizing over the last six months. By this time next week, we will be in a major demolition [mode].”

The end of The Mirage wasn’t lost on the speakers, including Wynn, former Mirage and MGM Resorts communications executive Alan Feldman and former Las Vegas Mayor Jan Jones Blackhurst.

Feldman said the Strip “is wildly different” than it was in 1989.

“There are no doubts about the impact this resort has had not only on Las Vegas but on the gaming industry around the globe,” Feldman said. “None of us ever believed that the success of The Mirage was about volcanos, tigers and dolphins, even though they each had a lot to do with the secret sauce.” 

Instead, Feldman credited the success to the “tens of thousands of Mirage employees” who took what they learned at the resort to casinos in Las Vegas and other parts of the world.