Posted on: October 9, 2024, 09:03h.
Last updated on: October 9, 2024, 09:20h.
The Tropicana Las Vegas is now just a vacant lot strewn with tons of debris. It was taken down in 22 seconds early Wednesday morning — one second for each of the remaining two towers’ 22 floors.
Seven minutes of fireworks and drone animations by Grucci preceded the implosion at 2:30 a.m. PT, as tourists and locals watched from the safety of nearby hotel rooms or amidst the chaos of attempting to do so on dust-enveloped nearby streets.
Co-managed by Controlled Demolition and GGG Demolition, the implosion took 22,000 lineal feet of detonating cord. The structural steel-framed Paradise Tower featured 220 cut-point locations loaded with 490 pounds of explosives, while the reinforced concrete-framed Club Tower had 1,130 boreholes filled with 1,700 pounds of explosives.
Here’s a video…
“Bally’s is honored to have been part of this historic moment, bidding farewell to the iconic Tropicana,” Soo Kim, chair of Bally’s Corporation, which owned the Tropicana, said in a speech before its implosion. “As we celebrate its legacy, we look ahead to building a world-class entertainment resort, the future home of the Athletics, and reinforcing Las Vegas as the ultimate sports and entertainment capital.”
Both Bally’s and A’s officials, including team owner John Fisher, went to great lengths to tie the implosion to a future A’s ballpark in people’s minds. The “Las Vegas A’s” logo even made its debut as a projection on at least one of the towers before they came down.
So far, however, that’s still wishful thinking, as Fisher has yet to demonstrate the $850 million in required equity financing for the stadium’s $1.5 billion construction cost.
The $1.2 million cost of the implosion was deducted from the same booty of public and private sources that will supposedly fund the stadium on nine of the site’s 35 acres.
The Tropicana’s History
The Tropicana Las Vegas, nicknamed “Tiffany of the Strip” because of its opulence and South Beach-inspired architecture, had been a cornerstone of the Las Vegas Strip since it opened in 1957 with the largest casino in Las Vegas.
As the Strip grew bigger and better in the ensuing decades, the Trop did its best to keep up. But by 2009 — the year its 50-year-strong showgirl show, “Folies Bergère,” finally hung up its headdresses — it had become something of a novelty anachronism, a place most visitors regarded as necessary to visit, but only once just to say they’d seen it.
