The oldest room on the Las Vegas Strip has been permanently closed since November
The imminent opening of Tropicana Las Vegas is no longer news. Sometime in the next few years, if all goes as planned, the casino resort will be "imploded" to make way for a baseball stadium renamed Las Vegas Sports.
What many tourists don't know is that the implosion will take away some of the oldest remaining hotel rooms on the Las Vegas Strip. Few people realize that these spaces are no longer open to the public. They quietly closed permanently in mid-November. According to hotel representatives, this was in preparation for the Trop Hotel's imminent demise.
For decades, the 300-room "bungalow" hotel opened on April 4, 1957, along with the Casino Hotel. They fan out from the main casino into two three-story wings forming a "V" shape. They remained so even though the original casino was demolished to build the resort's Tiffany Tower (now Paradise Tower), which opened in 1979.
Most tourists don't know that the Trop Hotel's bungalow rooms are the oldest on the Las Vegas Strip. That's because long before Tropicana opened on April 4, 1957, Flamingo and Sahara were mainstays on old Highway 91. (The name was changed to the Las Vegas Strip two years later.)
However, all of the original buildings that opened the Flamingo and Sahara in 1946 and 1952 respectively have long since been demolished.
Tropical Dog
The Trop Hotel was designed by hotelier Ben Jaffe, a partner in the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami. In 1955, he purchased 40 acres at the intersection of Highway 91 and Bond Road, just south of the Flamingo Hotel. He longed to own the best resort in Las Vegas but didn't want to build or operate it, so he leased the property to a company called Hotel Conquistador Inc., which had extensive experience in both areas.
The problem is that the experience is that of organized crime. The Conquistador Hotel was owned by Phil Kastel, who ran illegal bev's around New Orleans under Luciano's crime boss Frank Costello. Beverly Club Casino. The pair also ran a sizeable illegal pokies circuit.
Trop's operators have removed Kastel's name from the gaming license application ahead of a final hearing before the Gaming Control Board. But just a month after the premiere, Costello survived an assassination attempt ordered by rival New York mafia boss Vito Genovese. Police found a Tropicana promissory note with a gross profit of $651,284 in one of the gangster's coat pockets.
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However, national crime headlines haven't hurt business. They may even have added to the Tropp plot. When it opened, it was the most expensive casino ever built in Las Vegas. The $15 million price tag was far more than the $8.5 million it took to complete two years ago, and although it had 300 rooms, it was only one-third the size of the Stardust Hotel, which was due to open the following year.
"Extreme luxury, great taste, warmth, intimacy and functional efficiency," the Las Vegas Sun first described it.
The casino resort was popular, with stars like Sammy Davis Jr. and Elizabeth Taylor dropping in to visit headliners like Jayne Mansfield and Taylor's fiancée Eddie Fisher.
Tropp eventually earned the nickname "Tiffany on the Las Vegas Strip."
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By the early 1970s, however, Tiffany was being undermined by the lure of newer, larger rivals Caesars Palace and International Hotels (Las Vegas Hilton). Mitzi Stauffer Briggs, heir to the Stauffer Chemical fortune, bought the resort in 1975 with the goal of becoming more competitive. In 1977, she demolished the original casino and began construction of the 22-story Tiffany Tower.
A year later, a record-skimming operation run by the Civella crime family in Kansas City was revealed. The criminal gang was part of the plot of the hit 1995 film Casino, directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and Sharon Stone.
Because of its Mafia connections, Briggs was forced to sell the Trop Hotel to its first business owner, Ramada, who added a second tower (the island) in 1986. However, the Trop Hotel's reputation never recovered, experiencing a revolving door of financially strapped new owners who promised renovations that never materialized.
In 2015, Penn National Gaming (later Penn Entertainment) acquired Trop for $360 million. The company sold the land it occupied to a spin-off company, Gaming and Leisure Properties (GLPI), during the COVID-19 pandemic. In September 2022, Bally's Corporation purchased Tropicana's non-land assets from GLPI for $148 million and leased the land to GLPI for an annual lease of $10.5 million.
In May 2023, Bally's announced an agreement with the Oakland Athletics baseball team to develop a new ballpark.
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Source: www.casino.org
