Las Vegas will literally bid farewell to Tropicana with an eye-catching implosion

LAS VEGAS – Sin City will literally kiss the Tropicana goodbye before dawn in an elaborate implosion that will reduce the last real mob building on the Las Vegas Strip to rubble.

The Tropicana hotel towers are expected to collapse in 22 seconds at 2:30 a.m. Wednesday. The celebration includes fireworks and a drone show.

It will be the first implosion in nearly a decade for a city that loves new beginnings and has made casino implosions as much a part of its identity as gambling itself.

“What Las Vegas has done, in classic Las Vegas style, has turned many of these implosions into spectacles,” said Geoff Schumacher, historian and vice president of exhibitions and programs at the Mob Museum.

Former casino mogul Steve Wynn changed the way Las Vegas blew up casinos in 1993 with the implosion of the dunes to make way for the Bellagio. In addition to thinking about televising the event, Wynn invented a fantastical story for the implosion, making it seem like pirate ships were shooting into the dunes at his other casino across the street.

From then on, says Schumacher, people in Las Vegas had the feeling that destruction on this scale was worth seeing.

The city hasn't blown up a strip casino since 2016, when the Riviera's last tower was leveled for a convention center expansion.

This time, the implosion will free up land for a $1.5 billion baseball stadium for the relocating Oakland Athletics, part of the city's recent rebranding as a sports center.

That leaves only the Flamingo from the city's mob era left 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 Strip's third-oldest casino, closed in April after welcoming guests for 67 years.

It was once known as the “Tiffany of the Strip” for its opulence and was a frequent haunt of the legendary Rat Pack. His past among the Mafia has long cemented his place in Las Vegas lore.

It opened in 1957 with three floors and 300 hotel rooms in two wings.

While Las Vegas developed rapidly in the following decades and experienced a construction boom of Strip mega-resorts in the 1990s, the Tropicana also underwent major changes. In later years two hotel towers were added. In 1979, the casino's popular $1 million green and amber stained glass ceiling was installed above the casino floor.

However, the Tropicana's original low-rise hotel wings survived many renovations, making it the last true mob structure on the Strip.

Behind the scenes of the casino's opening, the Tropicana had ties to organized crime, most notably through alleged gangster Frank Costello.

Costello was shot in the head weeks after the Tropicana debuted in New York. He survived, but the investigation led to police finding a piece of paper in his coat pocket with the Tropicana's exact earnings figures, revealing the gang's share of the casino.

In the 1970s, federal authorities investigating mobsters in Kansas City accused more than a dozen agents of conspiring to skim $2 million in gambling revenue from Las Vegas casinos, including the Tropicana. Charges related to the Tropicana alone resulted in five convictions.

Wednesday's implosion will be streamed live and televised by local news stations.

There will be no public viewing areas for the event, but fans of the Tropicana had the opportunity to say goodbye to the vintage Las Vegas relic in April.

“Old Vegas, here we go,” said Joe Zappulla, a New Jersey resident, with tears in his eyes as he left the casino just before the locks on the doors were opened.