Nearly 25 years after it first opened, the resort-casino on the corner of Paradise Road and Harmon Avenue is celebrating its final days as the Hard Rock Hotel. The off-Strip resort-casino will host its Last Great Party Weekend Jan. 30-Feb 2, offering free live music and a final toast. The property will shut down at 3 a.m. Monday, reopening in the fall as Virgin Hotels Las Vegas. (Las Vegas Review-Journal)
The two-week-long demolition of the cafe, which began Monday afternoon, is one of the first steps of the Las Vegas Hard Rock Hotel’s transformation to Virgin Hotels Las Vegas. The resort-casino will close its doors Feb. 3 for renovations, and is set to reopen in the fall of 2020.
At a news conference prior to the Vegas Golden Knights first playoff home game, NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman announced that Las Vegas will host the 2018 NHL Awards on June 20 at the Hard Rock Hotel’s Joint Theater and that the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority have agreed to extend their partnership.
Maybe the giant neon guitar that stood at the entrance of the Hard Rock Cafe Las Vegas on Paradise Road isn’t the flashiest neon sign ever created by Young Electric Sign Co., which has been producing some of the city’s flashiest signs since the 1930s. Still, when the Hard Rock closed on the last day of 2016, there was no guarantee that the sign wouldn’t go the way of so many hotels and historic artifacts in Las Vegas — to dust. But thanks to YESCO’s donation of the sign to the Neon Museum, the restored guitar one day will again rock on. The museum is conducting a crowdfunding campaign to raise the estimated $350,000 needed to refurbish the guitar and display it. The guitar soars to 72 feet on its own, and to 86 feet when you include its base. Guitars eventually became the Hard Rock’s signature signage, appearing, with variations, at other locations.