Steve Wynn Recalls $630M Mirage Build at Neon Museum Talk
Steve Wynn held the room at the Golden Nugget for nearly two hours on October 22, walking 600 people through how The Mirage got built. The Neon Museum put on the event as part of its yearly "Reflections of The Mirage" Duck Duck Shed celebration. Money raised went to the museum's preservation work.
November 1989 was the opening. Cost came in around $630 million, a staggering figure back then, and plenty of skeptics figured the place could never pull in enough revenue to keep the lights on. Wynn says it turned a profit almost immediately. Opening day drew tens of thousands of visitors, and not a single facility had room to spare.
With 3,044 rooms, big-budget production shows and elaborate attractions, the resort set a new bar for what a casino could be. Investment poured onto the Strip in its wake, and the corridor kept expanding through the 1990s.
The land deal almost collapsed. A single parcel still belonged to Grace Hayes, a former actress who refused to part with the house she'd shared with her late husband, screenwriter Robert Hopkins. Howard Hughes had tried to buy it once and walked away empty-handed. Wynn brought Hayes a model of the planned development and won her over. She got $2 million for the house and the adjoining property, plus a luxury suite at the Golden Nugget for the rest of her life. Construction started in 1986.
The first blueprint called for a large water feature. Lighting designer David Hersey raised a technical problem: lighting a waterfall wasn't going to work. So the team went with a volcano. Fire and water erupting on cue became the resort's signature. Siegfried & Roy had a home there too, and so did a dolphin habitat that drew school groups, Clark County marine biology students among them.
July 2024 brought the closure. Next up is a Hard Rock-branded resort with a guitar-shaped tower.
Wynn stepped down as chairman and chief executive of Wynn Resorts in 2018 amid sexual misconduct allegations, which he denies. In 2019, Nevada regulators fined the company $20 million over the way it handled complaints involving him. The museum announced his talk back in July, and it has also kept artifacts from the old resort.