LAS VEGAS (AP) — The Mirage is about to vanish from the Las Vegas Strip.

Gambling ends and the doors close Wednesday at the iconic tropical island-themed hotel-casino that opened in 1989 with a fire-spewing volcano outside, and Siegfried & Roy’s lions and dolphins inside.

Frenzied final days have seen standing-room crowds wagering to win $1.6 million in slot machine progressive jackpot winnings that state regulations say have to be disbursed before the lights go out and a massive transformation of the property begins.

Guest rooms are already empty. The Beatles-themed Cirque du Soleil show “Love” ended its 18-year run earlier this month. When gamblers are gone, only memories will remain of former casino mogul Steve Wynn’s hotel that revolutionized the casino resort industry.

“Las Vegas always reinvents itself,” said Michael Green, a University of Nevada, Las Vegas history professor whose father dealt blackjack for decades at casinos, including the long-ago-imploded Stardust and Showboat. “The Mirage is no longer state-of-the-art.”

New operators Hard Rock International and Florida-based Seminole Gaming plan to add 600 rooms to an existing 3,044 in a bright new guitar-shaped hotel where the sidewalk-side volcano rumbled and gushed nightly. Renderings depict guitar string-like beams spiking into the night sky from a purplish 660-foot (201-meter) tower.

“The Mirage was a transcendent property, changing the landscape of Las Vegas,” said Joe Lupo, president of The Mirage who will stay on at the new resort. “We are confident that Hard Rock Las Vegas will do the same in 2027.”

There won’t be a demolition spectacle like the now-shuttered Tropicana casino-hotelseveral blocks down the Strip. That 22-story property is slated to be dynamited sometime later this year, to be replaced before 2028 by a baseball stadium to serve as the home field of the relocated MLB Oakland A’s.

At ceremonies Wednesday, some of the 127 employees who’ve been at The Mirage since it opened planned to mark its end with Lupo; Jim Allen, chairman of Hard Rock International and CEO of Seminole Gaming; and Alan Feldman, a longtime MGM Resorts casino executive who is now a fellow at the gambling institute at University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Feldman was Wynn’s first publicist at the new resort.

“The doors opened to a crush of humanity and it stayed like that for days,” Feldman recalled in an interview. “It’s hard to capture what The Mirage changed. One of the things was that Las Vegas became more than Elvis, showgirls, round beds and gambling.”

Costing $630 million, it was no simple gambling hall. It was the world’s largest hotel at the time. Guests were met by a faint piña colada scent and two bronze mermaid statues on the way to check in at a desk with a huge shark and reef fish tank behind it.

It had glitzy shops, celebrity chef restaurants and theater-sized showrooms featuring headliners like Johnny Mathis, Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton.

“Instead of neon, a garden of dozens of rich Canary Island palm trees and a cool refreshing waterfall,” Wynn recalled in a statement released Monday through his Las Vegas attorney, Donald Campbell. Wynn titled it “An Homage to Lady Mirage.”