The Strip’s largest resort construction project hit a major milestone Friday morning when the final structural beam was placed atop the Guitar Hotel Las Vegas.
Nineteen months to the day that ground was first broken on the site of the former Mirage hotel casino, Hard Rock International and Seminole Gaming held a topping out ceremony to celebrate the structural completion of the 660-foot guitar-shaped hotel in the center of the Strip.
“We are sitting here at the foot of a structure that will change the skyline, bring millions more visitors to the Las Vegas Strip and also employ up to 6,000 Las Vegas residents from our community,” said Joe Lupo, president of Hard Rock Las Vegas. “It is truly an honor for the Hard Rock Las Vegas team, who are here today, to know that in about a year and a half we will be handed the keys and confidently open the next great, highly successful resort here in Las Vegas.”
In addition to construction of the Guitar Hotel, crews are also working on a total transformation of the former Mirage tri-tower structure, which will become the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Las Vegas. The approximately $4 billion resort complex is scheduled to open by the end of the second half of 2027.
“The progress speaks for itself. The quality of the work is amazing,” said Ragheb Dajani, senior vice president of development for Hard Rock International. “With all the hard work of all the thousands of construction workers, we set out to not only reach this milestone successfully, but also help push forward to finish this project. That’s the significance of this milestone.”
Dajani said that while the word “iconic” gets thrown around a lot, it was “appropriate” to use to describe the Guitar Hotel.
“The Guitar Tower is going to be the next landmark in Vegas,” he said. “It’s a building that everyone will know and recognize. We don’t need to put names or signs on it.”
While Friday’s event was largely symbolic, the gratitude and appreciation shown to workers from Penta Building Group and McCarthy Building Companies, as well as the design team from Klai Juba Wald, was very real.
“From day one, this construction team has been committed and dedicated to this incredible project, maintaining the highest safety standards while creating an extraordinary project,” Lupo told a gathered crowd of invited guests and scores of construction workers.
Clark County Commissioner Tick Segerblom also praised the construction crew during Friday’s ceremony.
“We are so proud of who we are in Las Vegas and the fact that we have the best workers in the world,” he said. “And nowhere else would you be able to build this type of project, this quickly, this quality.”
Jeff Walker, vice president of construction for Penta, said the Guitar Hotel project expanded the existing property’s footprint by 1.4 million square feet, used 14.5 million pounds of structural steel and saw roughly 100,000 yards of concrete poured.
“But the most important part, and along with delivering this project in a quality way, on time and under budget, is getting everyone home in the same condition they came to work,” he said, noting that there has only been one lost-time accident since work began in the summer of 2024.
The Guitar Hotel will consist of 42 stories, with the lower 100 feet of the tower containing the first five floors, and the remaining 560 feet will house its 675 hotel rooms and suites.
When completed, the new Hard Rock complex will include nearly 3,600 hotel rooms, approximately 175,000 square feet of gaming space, two spas, multiple pools, live entertainment venues and dozens of restaurants, lounges and shops.
Hard Rock International, owned by the Seminole Tribe of Florida, bought The Mirage for $1.075 billion in 2022 from Las Vegas-based MGM Resorts International. Hard Rock closed The Mirage on July 17, 2024.
Contact David Danzis at ddanzis@ theplayerlounge.com or 702-383-0378. Follow @AC2Vegas_Danzis on X.
