History
Ground was broken for the Luxor in 1992 and officially opened eighteen months later at 4 A.M on October 15, 1993, to a crowd of 10,000 people. When it opened, the pyramid, which cost $375 million to build, was the tallest building on the strip and contained 2,526 rooms and a 100,000 sq ft (9,300 m2) casino. The resort was financed by “petty cash” earned from other Circus Circus Enterprises properties and did not include any outside financial investors.
A theater and two additional hotel towers totaling 2,000 rooms were added in 1998 for $675 million. When the resort opened, it featured the Nile River Tour which was a river ride that carried guests to different parts of the pyramid and passed by pieces of ancient artwork on a river that encircled the casino. The casino also featured King Tut’s Tomb and Museum, a duplicate of King Tutankhamen’s tomb as found in the Valley of the Kings near Luxor, Egypt. In July 2007, owner MGM Resorts International announced plans to thoroughly renovate the Luxor, spending $300 million to remodel 80 percent of Luxor's public areas, removing much of the ancient Egyptian theme and replacing it with more adult-oriented and modern lounges, restaurants and clubs.
On May 7, 2007, a vehicle exploded in a Luxor Hotel parking garage due to a home-made bomb which left one dead. Local authorities believe the victim, a 24-year-old employee at Nathan’s Famous hot dog restaurant in the Luxor food court, was the intended target. The hotel was not evacuated, operations continued uninterrupted, and the parking structure as well as the casino were undamaged.
Read more about this topic: Luxor Las Vegas
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“Gossip is charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“In the history of the human mind, these glowing and ruddy fables precede the noonday thoughts of men, as Aurora the sun’s rays. The matutine intellect of the poet, keeping in advance of the glare of philosophy, always dwells in this auroral atmosphere.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)