The Tropicana Hotel stood, in some form or fashion, for 67 years, but it took just 22 seconds to level the famed casino’s two 23-story hotel towers in Las Vegas on Oct. 9, although it required months of preparation since its April closure.
GGG Demolition Inc. of Orange, Calif., completed all the pre-demolition work, removing smaller buildings on the property and handling interior pre-demolition. It also will handle the post-implosion debris removal and other site preparation, including removing building foundations and grading the property.
Controlled Demolition Inc. (CDI) of Phoenix, Md., handled the implosion of the two towers, which was preceded — in true Las Vegas fashion — by a seven-minute fireworks and 555-drone show.
“It was a remarkable end result for everyone to watch and see. … This definitely set a standard for whoever is doing the next one,” said Vince Gutierrez, the on-site senior project manager of GGG. “It’s a nice way to say goodbye to an iconic standard like the Tropicana.”
BIG photo
A rendering of the proposed A’s stadium at the site.
The site will be redeveloped into a $1.5 billion, 33,000-fan capacity domed baseball stadium for the relocating Oakland A’s. The stadium will encompass about nine of the 35 acres on site, with Tropicana owner Bally’s Corp. planning to build a future resort on the remainder, according to the Las Vegas Journal-Review.
CDI has plenty of familiarity with Las Vegas, having leveled 32 other buildings there, with company President Mark Loizeaux on site for every strip property, including the Dunes in 1993 and the Riviera in 2016.
Loizeaux said the implosion went off without a hitch and the company maintained a perfect record.
“There was not a single window broken,” he said, adding that the post-blast report showed less than expected levels of resulting dust. “It went exactly per plans. … They have two well-broken piles of debris.”
Although both the Paradise Tower closer to Las Vegas Boulevard and Club Tower were imploded simultaneously, different methods were used, Loizeaux said. The two towers combined housed 917,400 sq. ft. and required 22,000 ft. of detonating cord.
And while the blast itself was routine, the contractor, whose company debuted in 1947 by felling a chimney, was surprised at how well the two towers were built.
The Club Tower was concrete framed, so dynamite was used to knock it down. Certain pillars were blasted with dynamite to weaken them. Those pillars, therefore, couldn’t support the building’s weight, prompting a collapse.
“It had more rebar in it per yard of concrete than I had ever seen,” Loizeaux said, adding that the 1,130 boreholes drilled into it required diamond core bits instead of the usual pneumatic drills.
Gutierrez noted that the diamond core bit drilling took a lot longer than pneumatic drilling, stressing the project’s
timelines.
Meantime, the Paradise Tower was steel framed, prompting a different method.
“It was a very robust, well-built structure,” Louizeaux said, noting that commercial facilities don’t often use that level of construction.
To topple the Paradise Tower, a charge sent copper into the steel, weakening it. Linear-shaped charges that created 3 million pounds per square inch of pressure were placed on five different floors, Loizeaux said. There were 220 cut-point locations in the tower.
“To use an overused analogy, if you have a soft stick of butter and you put a knife through, it doesn’t melt the butter. It doesn’t vaporize it. It just shoves it sideways. That’s what the copper does,” Loizeaux told fox5vegas.com before the implosion.
GGG Construction photo
Las Vegas is known for spectacles and this implosion was no exception, but Loizeaux explained why the implosion occurred at 2:30 a.m. local time on a Tuesday.
“Clark County says there’s the least activity on Las Vegas Boulevard at that time,” he said. “Also, historically, the lowest winds are at night, keeping the dust from moving around.”
Speaking of dust, Loizeaux praised GGG for its advance work.
“They did as good a job supporting CDI as any contractor I’ve worked with,” he said.
GGG “soft stripped” the buildings, removing things such as carpeting and drapes and also eliminated “dust creators” such as drywall. They also recycled concrete on site.
“Now, after the implosion, we will be getting the site clean, from the debris piles to removing foundations to grading the property,” Gutierrez said.
Gutierrez said he expects the process to take three or four more months.
The concrete will be cleaned, processed and crushed, then sold as a base material for roadways and parking areas. The steel and metal will be removed from the concrete and sold to a recycling center, Gutierrez said.
“The structures you see — 98 percent will be recycled,” he said. “There will be very little that will be required to be moved to a landfill.”
The sheer size of the project has created challenges for the contractors, Gutierrez said. One challenge was finding the specialty labor needed. While that labor is plentiful in GGG’s southern California home, it was less plentiful in Las Vegas, creating worries about safety, reliability and productivity.
“At our peak, between our labor and our subs. we had 120-130 guys on site,” he said.
In addition, there was a lot of coordination required between the contractors, Bally’s, government agencies and site neighbors.
“As much as we thought we were on top of talking to agencies and neighbors … there were last-minute issues that had to be dealt with,” Gutierrez said, adding that the contractor has a great relationship with Bally’s.
Heading the effort to level the nine structures originally on site, Miller Environmental of Orange, Calif. (the parent company of GGG) assembled an armada of equipment, including at least 10 Link-Belt excavators, a host of attachments and support equipment.
“When we first got on site in March, we dealt with some minor asbestos abatement,” said Gregg Miller, ME’s president and owner, in a previous Construction Equipment Guide article. “Despite the Trop’s age, there had been so many additions and renovations over the years that the bulk of the asbestos had already been removed. We quickly moved to demoing 100,000 sq. ft. of smaller three- and four-story structures that were part of the original Trop layout.”
Though dwarfed by most of the newer mega properties on The Strip, the Trop complex contained more than 1.7 million sq. ft. of structures, including the towers, a pair of parking garages (one above ground, one below), a pool/spa area, a theater, the casino gaming area and 184,000 sq. ft. of support facilities.
“Because we plan to recycle the concrete and steel from each structure, we are choosing to gut each structure before implosion,” he said. “If we were to simply drop the structures as they are, we would contaminate that valuable debris with all the building components: the walls, the ceilings, the carpet, furniture and so on.
“So, working from the ground up, we are tackling an interior demolition effort, three floors at a time. We have a dozen Bobcat loaders — two on each floor of each tower — gutting the rooms, punching a hole in the exterior wall, and pushing the debris to a pile below.”
By project’s end, Miller estimated they will recover about 180,000 tons of concrete and asphalt and 9,000 tons of ferrous/nonferrous metals.
Bally’s Corp. photo
The Tropicana’s front entrance at its 1957 debut.
The Tropicana debuted on April 4, 1957, and closed on April 2, 2024, two days shy of 67 years, according to Las Vegas Weekly.
It opened with 300 rooms and cost a then-record $15 million to build, according to Newsweek. It was the city’s largest casino at the time.
When it debuted, it was known as the “Tiffany of the Strip,” attracting stars who visited and performed there. It was featured in movies including “Viva Las Vegas” and “Diamonds Are Forever,” according to Las Vegas Weekly. It also hosted “Folies Bergere” for 50 years and jazz artists such as Benny Goodman and Louis Armstrong in its Blue Room.
In addition, Rat Packers Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. were all regular visitors.
And the Tropicana had ties to organized crime, according to Newsweek. Mobster Frank Costello had a financial interest in the property when it debuted. In the 1970s, federal officials explored Kansas City mobsters skimming money from the Tropicana and other casinos. Multiple convictions eventually occurred.
The Tropicana’s implosion leaves the Flamingo as the only mob-era casino remaining. CEG
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