The last remaining buildings of the Tropicana Las Vegas hotel and casino will be imploded in the wee hours of Wednesday morning. Only two hotel towers of the old resort remained standing Tuesday, six months after the Tropicana closed its doors . Those towers are scheduled to fall around 2:30 a.
m. Wednesday — in stereotypical Las Vegas fashion, accompanied by a drone show and fireworks. There will be no public viewing areas for Wednesday morning’s show, but it will broadcast on local TV stations and visible from nearby hotels.
The Tropicana’s fate was sealed in May 2023, when its owners at Bally’s Corporation reached a deal with the Oakland A’s to build a ballpark on the site. That park is supposed to be ready for the 2028 MLB season, with construction taking place for the next three years. But the first step will be destruction.
Las Vegas has become notorious for blowing up formerly pricey casinos and putting up new superstructures in their place. The Tropicana will be just the latest in a long line of old casinos to fall, including the Dunes, Sands, Desert Inn, Aladdin and Stardust. “What Las Vegas has done, in classic Las Vegas style, they’ve turned many of these implosions into spectacles,” Geoff Schumacher of the city’s Mob Museum told The Associated Press.
Casino magnate Steve Wynn was credited with turning demolition into a must-watch scene when he created a whole show around the implosion of the Dunes in 1993 to build the Bellagio . The city’s most .
