KVIG Informative

Bally’s Corporation imploded the Tropicana on Oct. 9, 2024, clearing 917,400 square feet of Strip casino floor for a Major League Baseball stadium and a new resort. The same demolition method cleared a different aging resort on the same Strip 31 years earlier, and Las Vegas has been financing its next generation of casinos by leveling the last one’s ever since.

The Dunes opened on the Las Vegas Strip in 1955, one of three resorts to debut there that year, according to a finding aid for the Dunes Hotel and Casino Records held by UNLV Special Collections. Architects Robert Dorr Jr. and John Replogle designed the property for $3.5 million, topping it with a 30-foot fiberglass sultan figure on the roof, the finding aid says.

The Dunes’ original owners had no gaming experience, and the property struggled from the start. In 1956, the Sands Hotel’s own management team took over daily operations to stabilize it, according to the UNLV finding aid. Arteburn Riddle became general manager later that year and spent the next decade building the Dunes into one of the Strip’s signature properties.

Riddle’s additions included Minsky’s Follies in 1957, the first topless production show on the Strip; the Sultan’s Table gourmet restaurant in 1961; and what the finding aid describes as Nevada’s largest 18-hole golf course at the time. The Casino de Paris production show, featuring French singer Line Renaud, debuted in December 1963 and ran until 1981. A 24-story, 250-room tower opened in July 1965, alongside a 185-foot free-standing neon sign the finding aid describes as the world’s largest of its kind when it went up.

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The Dunes fell into financial decline through the 1980s, according to the same UNLV finding aid. Steve Wynn, who already owned the Mirage down the street, purchased the property in 1992.

Crews imploded the Dunes on Oct. 27, 1993, an event UNLV Special Collections documented in dated photographs held in its portal archive. Wynn’s Bellagio opened on the same ground in October 1998.

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The Tropicana followed the same script in 2024. Bally’s Corporation imploded the resort’s Paradise and Club towers, both 23 stories, using 490 pounds of explosives across 220 cut-point locations in one tower and 1,700 pounds across 1,130 boreholes in the other, connected by 22,000 linear feet of detonating cord, according to the company’s own account of the demolition. The two towers came down in about 22 seconds. The Athletics are set to open a new ballpark on the site in time for the 2028 season, alongside a separate Bally’s Entertainment Resort Destination, the company says.

Sixty-nine years separate the Dunes’ 1955 opening from the Tropicana’s 2024 implosion, and the Strip has now watched the same transaction happen twice: an aging, individually built resort reduced to rubble in under a minute so a larger, more heavily financed operator can start over on the same ground. The corporations doing the building have changed. The method for clearing their predecessors off the Strip has not.