LAS VEGAS (AP) — Sin City blew a kiss goodbye to the Tropicana before first light Wednesday in an elaborate implosion that reduced to rubble the last true mob building on the Las Vegas Strip.
The Tropicana’s hotel towers tumbled in a celebration that included a fireworks display. It was the first implosion in nearly a decade for a city that loves fresh starts and that has made casino implosions as much a part of its identity as gambling itself.
“What Las Vegas has done, in classic Las Vegas style, they’ve turned many of these implosions into spectacles,” said Geoff Schumacher, historian and vice president of exhibits and programs at the Mob Museum.
Former casino mogul Steve Wynn changed the way Las Vegas blows up casinos in 1993 with the implosion of the Dunes to make room for the Bellagio. Wynn thought not only to televise the event but created a fantastical story for the implosion that made it look like pirate ships at his other casino across the street were firing at the Dunes.
From then on, Schumacher said, there was a sense in Las Vegas that destruction at that magnitude was worth witnessing.
The city hasn’t blown up a Strip casino since 2016, when the final tower of the Riviera was leveled for a convention center expansion.
This time, the implosion cleared land for a $1.5 billion baseball stadium for the relocating Oakland Athletics, part of the city’s latest rebrand into a sports hub.
That will leave only the Flamingo from the city’s mob era on the Strip. But, Schumacher said, the Flamingo’s original structures are long gone. The casino was completely rebuilt in the 1990s.
The Tropicana, the third-oldest casino on the Strip, closed in April after welcoming guests for 67 years.
Once known as the “Tiffany of the Strip” for its opulence, it was a frequent haunt of the legendary Rat Pack, while its past under the mob has long cemented its place in Las Vegas lore.
It opened in 1957 with three stories and 300 hotel rooms split into two wings.
As Las Vegas rapidly evolved in the following decades, including a building boom of Strip megaresorts in the 1990s, the Tropicana also underwent major changes. Two hotel towers were added in later years. In 1979, the casino’s beloved $1 million green-and-amber stained glass ceiling was installed above the casino floor.
The Tropicana’s original low-rise hotel wings survived the many renovations, however, making it the last true mob structure on the Strip.
Behind the scenes of the casino’s grand opening, the Tropicana had ties to organized crime, largely through reputed mobster Frank Costello.
Costello was shot in the head in New York weeks after the Tropicana’s debut. He survived, but the investigation led police to a piece of paper in his coat pocket with the Tropicana’s exact earnings figure, revealing the mob’s stake in the casino.
By the 1970s, federal authorities investigating mobsters in Kansas City charged more than a dozen operatives with conspiring to skim $2 million in gambling revenue from Las Vegas casinos, including the Tropicana. Charges connected to the Tropicana alone resulted in five convictions.
There were no public viewing areas for the event, but fans of the Tropicana did have a chance in April to bid farewell to the vintage Vegas relic.
“Old Vegas, it’s going,” Joe Zappulla, a teary-eyed New Jersey resident, said at the time as he exited the casino, shortly before the locks went on the doors.
ORIGINAL STORY (KNPR) — The Tropicana will be no more by the time you wake up on Wednesday.
The implosion of what was once called the "Tiffany of the Strip" is scheduled for 2:30 a.m. on Wednesday. There will be no public viewing areas, but local TV news stations will air live coverage beginning at 1 and 2 a.m. on Oct. 9. (If you won't be awake then, check back here in the morning.)
The affair aims to be another in a 31-year tradition of only-in-Vegas spectacles that go beyond demolition. Before the Trop's two towers go down, a drone show and fireworks will send off the Tropicana in celebratory fashion.
Marta Soligo, UNLV assistant professor and Director of Tourism Research at the university's Office of Economic Development, says that implosions — and spectacle — are part of Las Vegas' identity.
"The spectacularization of attraction is becoming a main component of the tourism experience — in today's society, everything can become a spectacle," she says. "I really think that these implosions are becoming really authentic to Vegas, and tourists love that."
Soligo adds that she understands the importance of implosions to people who have an association with the property being demolished; for them, an implosion can mean catharsis or closure, especially when they know the building must make way for something else. "We know that heritage is a keyword in tourism, and also place attachment," she says. "Several sociologists always criticize Las Vegas for being a non-place .. . but it's not a non-place for the people who work in those places every day, or maybe for the tourists who develop some kind of attachment to those places."
Just don't call it an erasure of history. UNLV history professor Michael Green says parts of the 66-year-old resort will be preserved by The Neon Museum and UNLV Special Collections, just two of the many entities doing often-under-the-radar historic preservation work in Las Vegas.
And before you trot out the familiar complaint that Las Vegas doesn't keep or respect its historic buildings: Green says that Las Vegas isn't the only city frequently changing its skyline. "I had a history class at UNLV from the late [urban history professor] Eugene Moehring ... [and] he took a corner in New York City and traced everything that had stood on it as far back as you could go in New York City, back to the days of the Dutch, and there was constant change. And so Las Vegas is perhaps a little less different in that regard than people may think."
Guests: Michael Green, associate professor of history, UNLV; Marta Soligo, assistant professor of sociology, UNLV
Note: The AP story was written by Rio Yamat.
