“Well, it’s gold,” Elvis Presley’s old guitarist said emphatically. “You know what? I think Elvis would be proud of the piano being here.”
Here, on Thursday morning, was the gleaming new atrium of the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino’s ongoing $720 million expansion, the centerpiece of which was an opulent, one-of-a-kind hunka-hunka-burnin’ rock history: A 24-karat gold leaf piano owned by Presley himself.
Perched around the corner from Lady Gaga’s Super Bowl halftime costume and down the way from Carl Perkins’ blue suede shoes, the piano might be Hard Rock International’s glitziest memorabilia pickup this decade, and one they’ve been waiting years to display.
“This has been a piece that we’ve held back,” said Hard Rock chairman Jim Allen. “We were always waiting for the right place.” Tampa, it turns out, is that place.
Built in 1928, the W.W. Kimball grand was purchased by Elvis for his mother in 1955, shortly before Heartbreak Hotel hit No. 1. The singer’s wife Priscilla Presley had it gilded with gold leaf as a first anniversary gift in 1968. After his death, a collector purchased the piano for $2 million and loaned it to the Country Music Hall of Fame, where it sat on display for more than two decades.
In 2015, the Hard Rock purchased the piano at auction for a price they won’t disclose (auction records list it as $610,000), crowing via press release that it was the company’s 80,000th item of memorabilia, and Tampa was the favorite to get it.
Rather than chucking the piano into an existing corner or corridor, the company designed and built a lavish, museum-like atrium all around it.
The piano sits on a marble platform, ensconced by a pair of curved escalators, which at 22 feet, 6 inches are tied for the tallest in North America, say Hard Rock officials. To its left and right are a pair of vintage Gibsons, and another one Presley played on stage in the mid- ’70s. Overhead lords a palatial Art Deco chandelier, a downpour of golden glass and metal cascading from a bright, domed skylight.
(Source: Tampa Bay Times)