LAS VEGAS (AP) — In the 1971 film “Diamonds Are Forever,” James Bond stays in a swanky suite at the Tropicana Las Vegas.
“I hear the Hotel Tropicana is very comfortable,” says Agent 007.
it was Tropicana’s heyday. This luxurious casino is frequented by the legendary Rat Pack, while its mob-controlled past cemented its place in Vegas lore.
But the doors of the Las Vegas Strip’s third-oldest casino, which has welcomed guests for 67 years, will be chained shut at noon Tuesday. Demolition is scheduled for October to secure $1.5 billion in funding. major league baseball stadium — part of the city’s latest rebranding as a sports entertainment hub.
Robert “Video Bob” Moseley was one of the last guests to check out the Tropicana before it closed for lunch. Sad to see his landmark go, Moseley paid $600 for a standard room and spent the night before at the casino with his friends.
“We’re losing this iconic part of Las Vegas. They’re going to kill Las Vegas,” Moseley said.
Tropicana bartender Charlie Granado said it’s a bittersweet ending for the restaurant he’s called his second home for 38 years.
“It’s time. It was a given,” Granado said. “It’s sad, but it also has a happy ending.”
When the Tropicana opened on the vast desert-surrounded Strip, the population of Clark County, which includes Las Vegas, had just topped 100,000. It cost him $15 million to build a three-story building with 300 rooms that he divided into two wings.
Its manicured lawns and flashy showroom earned it the nickname “Tiffany of the Strip.” There was a towering tulip-shaped fountain near the entrance, and the entire wall was covered in mosaic tiles and mahogany panels.
black and white photography From Elizabeth Taylor and Debbie Reynolds to Frank Sinatra and more. Sammy Davis Jr..
Mel Tormé And Eddie Fisher performed at the Tropicana. Gladys Knight and Wayne Newton have stayed here.
In a city known for reinvention, the Tropicana itself has undergone significant changes as Las Vegas has grown. In later years he added two hotel towers. In 1979, the casino’s now beloved $1 million green and amber stained glass ceiling was installed above the casino floor.
Barbara Boggess was 26 years old when she started working at Tropicana in 1978 as a linen room attendant.
“Tropicana was pretty much sitting here by itself,” Boggess said. “We were surrounded by desert. It used to take me 10 minutes to get to work. Now it takes me an hour.”
Boggess, now 72, has seen the Tropicana over and over again. Rebranded as “Las Vegas Island” in the 1980s, the pool featured a swim-up blackjack table, and a South Beach-themed renovation was completed in 2011.
Today, only the low-rise hotel room wing remains of the original Tropicana structure. Still, the casino still evokes nostalgia for old Las Vegas.
“It creates an old-school Las Vegas atmosphere,” said J.T. Ceumara, a Las Vegas resident who visited the casino in March. “When you first walk in, you see the stained glass and the low ceilings. I feel like I’m in the middle of nowhere,” he said.
Seumara and her husband stayed at the Tropicana to pay homage to this landmark. They walked around the casino floor and hotel, going through random hallways and exploring the convention center. They tried their luck at blackjack and roulette and struck up a conversation with a cocktail server who has worked there for 25 years. At the end of their stay, they pocketed a few red $5 poker chips to remember the casinos of their mob days.
Behind the scenes of the casino’s opening decades ago, Tropicana had ties to organized crime, primarily through notorious gangster Frank Costello.
A few weeks after the grand opening, Costello was shot in the head in New York. According to the Mob Museum, police found a piece of paper in Costello’s coat pocket that stated the exact amount of Tropicana’s profits and mentioned “money being skimmed” to Costello’s associates.
By the 1970s, federal authorities investigating Kansas City gangs had charged more than a dozen gang operatives with conspiring to siphon about $2 million in gambling revenue from Las Vegas casinos, including the Tropicana. He had five convictions for Tropicana-related charges alone.
However, this famous hotel-casino has been a mob-free success for many years. It was home to the city’s longest-running show, the Folies Bergere. The topless revue, imported from Paris, featured a winged showgirl, her current girlfriend of one of the most famous Las Vegas icons.
The Folies Bergere, which has been performed for nearly 50 years, featured elaborate costumes and stage sets, original music performed by a live orchestra, line dancers, magic shows, acrobatics and comedy. This cabaret was featured in the 1964 Elvis Presley film “Viva His Las Vegas.”
Today, this location at the southern end of the Las Vegas Strip intersects with a major thoroughfare named after the Tropicana. It is surrounded by the towering mega-resorts that Las Vegas is now known for.
However, nearby is the home of the NFL’s Las Vegas Raiders, who left Oakland, California in 2020, and the NHL’s Vegas Golden Knights, the city’s first major league professional team.
The stadium, planned for the basement of the Tropicana, is scheduled to open in 2028.
“There’s a lot of controversy about whether it should continue or be abolished,” Seumara said. “But what I love about Las Vegas is that it’s always reinventing itself.”
