Out with the legendary casino, in with the baseball team. The Las Vegas Review-Journal heralds the "new era" in Las Vegas that started early Wednesday with the planned implosion of the Strip's Tropicana hotel-casino, in part to make way for a $1.5 billion domed arena for the MLB's Athletics team following their split from Oakland. The scheduled detonation was a seven-minute show complete with drones and pyrotechnics (watch some of it here), with execs in attendance from the A's, the local tourism group, Nevada's Clark County, and Tropicana owner Bally's.
The AP notes this was the first implosion in Sin City in almost a decade—that detonation involved destroying the last tower of the Riviera in 2016. "What Las Vegas has done, in classic Las Vegas style, they've turned many of these implosions into spectacles," says Geoff Schumacher, historian at Vegas' Mob Museum. Speaking of the Mob, with the implosion of the Tropicana in the books, the Flamingo is now the last hotel-casino from the Rat Pack era remaining on the Strip, even though that structure was completely revamped in the 1990s.
"It is honoring what the Tropicana has meant to Las Vegas," Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority CEO Steve Hill said Tuesday, per the Review-Journal. "It's been a big part of our identity, our brand, and certainly early in its history it was an iconic location. Now we're going to turn into a new iconic location, which is very fitting for Las Vegas." Of the 35 acres formerly occupied by the hotel, nine will be used for the new stadium, which is set to begin construction in the second quarter of next year; baseball is expected to commence there in 2028. Bally's plans to build a new resort on the remaining land. (More Tropicana stories.)
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