Sin City will blow a kiss goodbye to the Tropicana before dawn on Wednesday with an elaborate implosion that will reduce the last true mob building on the Las Vegas Strip to rubble. The Tropicana’s hotel towers are set to collapse in just 22 seconds at 2:30 a.m.
, with a celebration that will include a fireworks display and drone show. This will mark the first implosion in nearly a decade for a city that relishes fresh starts and has made casino demolitions as iconic as its gambling. “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.
The nature of demolishing casinos in Vegas transformed in 1993, when former casino mogul Steve Wynn orchestrated the implosion of the Dunes to make space for the Bellagio. Wynn didn’t just televise the event; he created a dramatic storyline that made it look like pirate ships at his other casino across the street were attacking the Dunes. Since then, Schumacher noted, Las Vegas has regarded such grand-scale destruction as a must-see event.
The last time a Strip casino was demolished was in 2016, when the final tower of the Riviera was brought down for a convention center expansion. This upcoming implosion will make way for a $1.5 billion baseball stadium for the relocating Oakland Athletics, part of the city’s ongoing transformation into a sports hub.
Consequently, only the Flaming.
